The number of illegal migrants from the not-conflict-stricken nation of India crossing the English Channel in small boats is now larger than the figure for Albanians, government data has shown.
Indian boat migrants are now the second largest contingent of people crossing the English Channel to get into Britain, overtaking arrivals from Albania, which are said to have plummeted.
Migrants from India are already said to dominate the UK’s legal immigration system, with successive Conservative Party-run governments offering hundreds of thousands of visas to Indian nationals to live and work in the UK, despite longstanding promises from the party to bring overall immigration down following Brexit.
According to data released by the UK Home Office, additional Indian migrants are now arriving in the country illegally via small people-smuggler-operated boats the English Channel, with migrants from the country now representing the second largest nationality landing on Britain’s southern coast after Afghans, despite them hailing from a largely peaceful country which they presumably do not need to seek asylum from.
Overall, 675 Indians are said to have crossed the English Channel in the first quarter of this year, with the rising proportions of Indians being reportedly put down to an ease in Serbian border controls, as well as a more general feeling from migrants that the English Channel is now a relatively established and surefire way of immigrating to Britain.
Meanwhile, the number of Albanians has fallen from making up around half of the migrants arriving in Britain to just over a quarter. Yet, experts are said to believe that this figure will spike again during the summer, with the majority of arrivals from the Muslim-majority country landing in the UK between July and September last year.
The large proportion of Indian migrants entering Britain illegally is a mere fraction of the number entering Britain with the help of the Conservative government, with hundreds of thousands arriving in the UK last year, alone.
According to a report by the Times of India, a total of 25 per cent of the 2,836,490 visas issued by the UK last year went to Indians, making the country the single-largest recipient of British visas in 2022.
This in part appears to have occurred on the back of an active effort by the Conservative Party to encourage hundreds of thousands of Indians to come to Britain, with both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak making a big deal about supporting the arrival of more and more migrants from the region to presumably curry favour with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the hopes of striking a large post-Brexit trade deal with the former British colony.
Such support for Indian immigration may also have to do with the Conservative Party’s shifting voter base, with the Christian and Hindu diaspora from the country representing one of the few ethnic minorities in the UK who actually favour the Tories over their leftist Labour Party adversaries.
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