Calais Mayor: Channel Crisis Will Not Improve Because UK Refuses to Make Itself ‘Less Welcoming’

The Mayor of Calais, a French gateway for illegal migration to Britain, says the crisis will not improve because the British refuse to make themselves less “welcoming”.

Natacha Bouchart, of the right-establishment Republicans (Les Républicains), suggested that the latest Anglo-French deal on tackling the Channel migrant crisis — which will once again involve the British handing over tens of millions of pounds to the French, despite this never having succeeded in stopping numbers from rising up to now — is unlikely to succeed.

“There will be more and more agreements in the future, but if the root of the problem isn’t dealt with then it won’t change,” she told Sky News.

“To prevent the flow of migrants, Britain must become less welcoming. And it won’t do that,” she observed.

Indeed, migrants paying criminal people-smugglers to bring them to Britain by small boat from France and Belgium — perfectly safe European Union member-states — are being put up by the thousands in free accommodation, up to and including luxurious country mansion hotels, and seem to stand a much higher chance of having their dubious asylum claims accepted than elsewhere in Europe.

Albanians, for example, who hail from a country officially deemed safe by the British government, enjoyed an acceptance rate of 52 per cent, compared to eight per cent in France and zero asylum claims accepted in Germany and Sweden — countries not exactly known for being hawkish on mass migration.

Mayor Bouchart also suggested that the United Kingdom’s large black economy was an important pull factor for migrants, and the fact that the country does not have a national identity card system — fairly standard in Continental Europe but regarded as an unacceptable infringement of civil liberties in traditionally freer and less authoritarian Britain.

She also complained that the “British government has never, ever, ever given a single friendly gesture or co-operation on a project for the people of Calais. And that — well, I find that completely abnormal”– although this is somewhat less credible than her other comments, given the British have not only refrained from simply turning back boat migrants at sea for years, but have also handed over billions for the French to beef up security and other infrastructure in and around Calais.

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