It appears that human traffickers are stuffing more and more migrants onto the small boats used for crossing the English Channel, with the average number of migrants per boat breaching 50 for the first time on Wednesday.
Human traffickers at the centre of the deadly trade that illegally smuggles people into Britain via the English Channel appear to be shoving more and more migrants onto each individual boat, government statistics appear to reveal.
All efforts by UK officials to stop the trade have so far been abysmal failures, with over 36,000 migrants having already made the journey into Britain in 2022, a figure that already well eclipses the total number of migrants who made the journey last year.
While this journey has historically been dangerous enough as is — with dozens of people being killed over the last number of years trying to enter Britain — things could soon get even worse, with The Times reporting that the average number of migrants per boat has increased to over 50 for the first time.
Though the publication does not comment as to why the average number of migrants per boat has increased, the BBC has separately claimed that criminals involved in the trade now say they are struggling to source the small boats needed for the multitude of crossings.
Speaking to criminals about the issue, an undercover reporter was told that “there are not enough boats” due to “some problem in Germany”.
One smuggler is also said to have warned the journalist that the price for migrants looking to avail of the criminal enterprise could soon increase as a result of the shortage, the cause of which is not detailed in the report.
Traversing the English Channel in small boats over the winter months is already dangerous enough, with 27 being killed in the stretch last November after their boat capsized off the coast of Calais, France.
The possibility that human traffickers are now even further overloading vessels in order to keep profits up could add yet another level of risk to these voyages as Europe enters the winter months, with strong winds, poor visibility, and water temperatures as low as 8 degrees Celsius (46 degrees Fahrenheit) being par for the course on the stretch of water.
The issue of overladen migrant vessels has been a regular enough issue in the Mediterranean, with authorities from European nations being frequently forced to rescue large numbers of migrants when their overloaded vessels encounter problems at sea.
One instance of this earlier this year saw the Italian coast guard rescue 305 migrants 20 miles off the country’s coast after their small boat got into difficulty.
Of the over three hundred rescued, Reuters reports 17 as being women, and 6 as being minors.