Illegal migrants in charge of small boats across the English Channel face life in prison under revised immigration rules.
Those at the helm of small boats traversing the English Channel to bring illegal migrants into the UK will now face up to life in prison under revised immigration rules that came into force on Tuesday.
Under the Nationality and Borders Act, those at the tiller of these small boats will be classified as people smugglers.
According to a report by The Telegraph, ordinary illegal migrants are also now facing larger prison terms for their actions, with a maximum sentence of four years behind bars now being set for illegal entry into Britain.
The publication goes on to note that the move is yet another attempt by Boris Johnson’s government to placate voters angry about Westminster’s failure to curtail the current wave of migrants illegally crossing the channel.
While other attempts have been made — like deploying the navy, a move critics say really only allows Britain to ferry migrants to Dover more efficiently, not actually working as a deterrent — around 12,000 migrants having illegally made the journey this year, a considerable increase over the number last year.
Extending jail terms for migrants is only one deterrent scheme authorities in the UK have dreamed up to try and discourage illegals from making the dangerous channel crossing from France to Britain, with the country attempting to deploy others to lower the number of arrivals.
Perhaps the most famous of these deterrence schemes is that of the Rwanda relocation plan, which threatens migrants who enter the UK illegally with removal to the sub-Saharan nation, where they will be allowed to claim asylum.
However, as of writing, this plan has been a non-starter, with the first and only removal flight — which had less than ten people on board at the time — being grounded by a court in Europe over concerns to do with human rights.
Even if the British government was to manage to get the plan up and running however, it is unclear how effective it would actually be, with official documents for the country’s Home Office suggesting that only a maximum of 300 individual migrants would be deported each year, despite arrivals numbering in the tens of thousands annually.
Despite this, the UK’s apparent hardening in its approach to illegals appears to have had an effect on neighbouring open borders Ireland, with the republic’s Europhile officials blaming a sudden spike in non-Ukrainian asylum claims on Britain’s border policy changes.
Seeing around 4,500 arrivals so far this year, the figure blows out of the water the expected 3,500 expected claim refugee status in 2022 at a time when the country is already struggling to appropriately care for tens of thousands of ostensibly Ukrainian refugees.
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