On Monday August 22, 1,295 migrants were apprehended on the British coast of Kent after crossing the Channel on 27 makeshift boats (“small boats”)according to the UK Home Office.
This is a new peak in daily crossings, exceeding the previous one, established at 1,185 on November 11, 2021, a particularly intense month during which 27 migrants lost their lives in a shipwreck. The crossing peaks generally correspond to periods presenting the optimal weather conditions for the season.
The continued increase in the passage of migrants in this maritime area among the busiest in the world does not seem to be affected by the successive plans of the British Conservative government. More than 22,000 people have crossed the Channel since the start of the year, 10,000 more than the previous year at the same time.
The number of passages could double in 2022
Over the whole of 2021, the British authorities had counted 28,526 crossings on board small boats, a figure already three times higher than the previous year (8,466). A British parliamentary report last July estimated that the number of crossings could double this year and reach 60,000.
On the French side, the maritime prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea recorded 533 attempted crossings involving 18,763 people between 1er January and July 31, 2022. They had been around 12,100 over the same period in 2021.
This “massification of departures” was already highlighted in its 2020 activity report by the Gris-Nez regional operational surveillance and rescue center (Cross), which coordinates rescues at sea in an area of competence ranging from the Belgian border to Cap d’Antifer, a few kilometers south-west of Etretat. It is linked to the intensification of controls on the legal passageways to the United Kingdom, from the port of Calais or through the Channel Tunnel. As Charlotte Kwantes, head of the Utopia 56 association, recalled in 2021, “until safe passageways are established between England and France, or until such persons can be regularized in France, (…) there will be deaths at the border”.
Faced with the scale of the situation, the British government has constantly taken a tougher stance, recently announcing the deportation of asylum seekers who arrived illegally to Rwanda, a country with which the United Kingdom has signed an agreement on this subject. The first flight which was to convey 130 migrants (including Iranians, Iraqis, Albanians and Syrians) to Kigali was canceled by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.
