Get spotted making your way across the Channel to Britain and the English authorities will wilfully help you on your way, completing the job for which traffickers were paid a grand sum. But get caught trying to leave Britain, to make your way back to France, and you’ll be stopped in your tracks.
This is what a number of illegal migrants have found after successfully arriving in Britain but then, believing it to be a disappointment, being stopped by the police while trying to escape.
Robert Bates, research director at the Centre for Migration Control think tank, told The European Conservative that “this whole situation is now truly entering a realm beyond parody.”
One North African migrant, who arrived in Britain last July after paying traffickers £1,000 (€1,170) for a place on a cramped boat, told The Daily Mail that this “was the biggest mistake of my life.” The 17-year-old is now homeless, described by the newspaper as “a casualty of Britain’s chaotic asylum system,” and says he will have a “big party” to make “the happiest day of my life”—that is, the day he makes it back to France. He recently made it into the back of one lorry, but was dismayed to find that it stopped not on the other side of the Channel but outside London City Airport.
Another said that he has been trying to get out of Britain for some time, but keeps on being prevented from leaving:
I am trapped in your country. I have been trying to get on a lorry for five months. The police spot me and bring me back to Dover. They won’t let me go.
Of course, it didn’t take long for traffickers to spot another money-making opportunity; £1,800 (€2,100) is described as the “going-rate” for a spot on a lorry to France.
With the UK asylum backlog at well over 100,000, many more Channel migrants are yet bound to find themselves wishing they had never come.
All this, said Robert Bates, makes it quite clear that Britain should start dealing with the issue of illegal migration more seriously. He told this publication:
Now is the time to follow the lead of other European nations and start deporting those who entered without permission.
Bates added that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights “would speed up the process and send a much stronger signal to others thinking about making the crossing,” though Conservative Party Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has already ruled this out.
Until something changes, this whole affair will continue to take place under the watch of what Bates described as the “impotent” Home Office. The department is even less likely to be given a kick by the incoming Labour government.
