Experts have urged the government to introduce safe routes to the UK after openDemocracy revealed that almost 400 people have died while trying to cross the English Channel in the past 25 years.
The government has committed more than £800m to Channel-related immigration measures since 2014, with money spent on security and deterrence measures including fences, walls, barbed wire, patrol officers and dogs, infrared detectors and lorry-sized X-ray machines.
Yet 391 people have lost their lives at the UK’s border since 1999, an average of one death every month, according to an investigation by French newspaper Les Jours, which openDemocracy has exclusively published in English.
Independent migration policy expert Zoe Gardner told openDemocracy that the bleak findings prove deterrents don’t work, warning that the only way to stop more people from dying is to overhaul the UK’s immigration policy.
“Staggering sums are being spent on an ever more lucrative and entrenched regime of surveillance, restriction, and enforcement, but numbers of people seeking safety remain stable,” she said.
Gardner described the situation as “an insane loop of continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results”, which is making attempts to reach the UK “more dangerous”.
The Les Jours-openDemocracy investigation found that the majority of those who have lost their lives on the border between the UK, France and Belgium over the past 25 years were men from China, Iraq, Vietnam and Sudan.
At least 27 women and 43 children have also been killed. One more child who has died in the weeks since the investigation concluded at the start of the year: fourteen-year-old Obada Abd Rabbo was one of five people to drown when a boat overturned in French waters on 14 January.
Most died while actively attempting to cross the border, with more than 75% of the deaths caused by asphyxiation, drowning, or road accidents. Others died from homicide, suicide, or a lack of medical care while living homeless and undocumented in Calais’ border area.
The UK must commit to welcoming at least 30,000 people a year through safe routesAslı Tatlıadım, Refugee Action
Responding to the findings, Aslı Tatlıadım, the head of campaigns for UK-based charity Refugee Action, told openDemocracy: “We know too well that lack of safe routes and increased securitisation of the border only push people to take more dangerous routes with devastating impacts on human life.”
Small boats have become the main route for irregular migration into the UK since 2018, as it has become harder to stow away in lorries or on Eurotunnel trains. The number of people attempting to cross the Channel in lorries fell from 50,000 in 2016 to just over 6,000 in 2022, according to data from the Pas-de-Calais local authority.
The government has ramped up its ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign in recent years, while Rishi Sunak is also currently trying to hurry his Rwanda Bill, which would allow asylum seekers to be deported to the African country after arriving in the UK, through Parliament.
Gardner believes these policies have little to do with saving lives, describing them as “an electioneering tool to distract attention from [the government’s] wide-ranging failings”.
She added: “[The government] has built up the asylum backlog to make us look away from the NHS backlog, and is scapegoating migrants for housing shortages to divert us from their failure to replace social housing stock.”
Westminster’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, a cross-party group of MPs and peers, yesterday warned that the Rwanda Bill may cause the UK to breach international law and threaten “the fundamental principle that human rights are universal”.
‘People move and always will’
Charities say the only way to stop the deaths is to offer safe routes into the UK.
Ninety percent of people who arrived in the UK on small boats last year applied for asylum, according to the Refugee Council. So far, more than 60% of those who have received a response have been granted refugee status or other leave.
More than 81,000 people made asylum applications – a 20-year high – in 2022, the latest year for which there is complete data, despite the millions being spent to prevent asylum seekers’ entry into the UK.
In that same year, 45,755 people made it to the UK after departing in a small boat, while the French authorities intercepted 33,788 attempts – a less than a 50% prevention rate, despite more than two decades of effort and enormous financial and human cost.
“The UK must commit to welcoming at least 30,000 people a year through safe routes,” said Tatlıadım. “It must also provide leave-to-enter passes to help people enter by land, sea or air, particularly from countries like Belgium and France… Only then, fewer people will be forced to risk their lives crossing the Channel.”
Until there is an alternative way to travel, there will always be another smuggler, another border official to bribe, or an even more dangerous crossing to tryZoe Gardner, migration policy expert
There are currently very few routes to asylum in the UK for undocumented migrants in northern France and Belgium. One is family reunification, a process often beset with delays that generally applies only to children reuniting with close relatives in the UK or adults reuniting with their legal partner.
Safe routes into the UK from further afield have continued to close over recent years. The government has failed to meet targets for resettlements and has presided over backlogs and delays for family reunification cases.
“Until there is an alternative way to travel, there will always be another smuggler, another border official who can be bribed, or an even more dangerous crossing to try,” said Gardner.
“[But] we need immigration, we benefit from it, [and] we deserve politicians willing to make the best of the simple reality that people move and always will.”
The Les Jours-openDemocracy investigation likened the English-French border to a ‘silent serial killer’, who has been on the loose for a quarter of a century. Many of the deaths went unnoticed by mainstream media, the courts and the police. Many of the victims were never properly identified.
The killer is still at large. Six more people have died since the investigations concluded at the start of the year. Campaigners say they won’t be the last.
