Immigration: dem dinghies

By Richard North - October 26, 2024

A crucial milestone was passed yesterday, not one about which we can be proud. That was the headcount of the illegal immigrants crossing the Channel and arriving in England, which has, with ten weeks to go to the end of the year, overtaken the total for the whole of 2023.

The count stands at 29,451 as compared with 29,437 in 2023, with 15,912 crossing since Labour came to power as opposed to the 15,068 who made the journey in the same period last year.

Another significant statistic to go with this figure is the number of immigrants per boat, increased to about 60 per dinghy from an average of close to 20 when the dinghy people started coming in 2018.

This is something which has been rehearsed at length by the Mail which is currently running an article headed: “The German connection: How people-traffickers are selling migrants £12,500 package deals of inflatable dinghy, outboard motor and 60 lifejackets to get across Channel to Britain”.

This article in turn seems to owe much to an “undercover” investigation by the BBC which highlights “‘Death trap’ Channel boats traded by smugglers in German city”.

Staying with the BBC, one has to wade through the colour writing and the broadcaster’s insistence in lubricating its reports with heavy doses of “human interest” detail, leaving the reader with the task of having to filter the extraneous material to get to the limited set of facts.

Eventually, we get to learn that that brokers have about ten warehouses in the Essen area of Germany, holding the dinghies used for the Channel crossings.

From Essen, close to the German border with the Netherlands, it seems the dinghies can be transferred to Calais within “three, four, hours”. Should a good weather forecast prompt a surge in crossing attempts and therefore demand, they can be delivered within a morning or afternoon, making the German city an important distribution hub.

But the origins of these dinghies are not to be found in Germany. Research by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, suggests that most are manufactured in China, whence they are sent in shipping containers to Turkey and then to Europe.

The dinghies are traded as part of a “package deal”, including engine, fuel, pump and 60 lifejackets, priced at about £12,500, delivered to the French coastline. The buyers are the people smugglers who sell spaces for as much as £2,000 a trip for adults, opening the way to substantial profits.

What comes over, for those prepared to spend the time filtering the chaff, is the flimsy nature of the dinghies, obviously built for cheapness and not in any way seaworthy. Although not said by the BBC, this underlines the close relationship between the smugglers and the French maritime authorities, the UK’s Border Force and the RNLI.

Simply, without their collective willingness – on the French part to escort the dinghies out to British waters, and then the British enthusiasm for plucking the illegals out of their boats before they sink (or capsize) – the smugglings trade simply would not be able to survive.

The middle men in all this – again, a point not made by the BBC – are the migrant charities, which advise the illegals on their passages, and then monitor their progress across the Channel, ready to raise the alarm if (or mostly when) they get into trouble.

Already this year, 55 illegal immigrants have lost their lives this year, the most lethal year so far, doubtless attributable to the higher load levels and the flimsy nature of the craft. Without the intervention of the charities and the official agencies, the toll would be much higher.

Arguably, if assistance were withdrawn from these crossings and it was made clear to the dinghy sailors that they were on their own if they get into trouble, the rate of crossing would diminish and possibly dwindle to nothing after a few high-profile sinkings and mass drownings.

Despite people wilfully putting their own lives at risk, in the expectation that they will be saved from their own folly, the British state feels impelled to rescue these people and bring them safely ashore, then to feed and house them at great expense.

Ironically, the State seems less concerned about saving the lives of indigenous British people, as we’ve seen most recently with the murder of 27-year-old Rhiannon Skye Whyte, a worker at the Park Inn by Radisson hotel in Walsall, which housed these illegals.

At the local railway station, Whyte was stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver by one of these migrants, the 18-year-old a Deng Chol Majek, initially described as “from Walsall”, although it later emerged that he was an asylum seeker at the hotel where Whyte had worked, probably originating from Sudan.

Such was the concern of the authorities to play down this killing that the British Transport Police described Whyte as having “sadly died following an incident”, stating initially only that “a man” had been arrested and charged with attempted murder, subsequently amended to murder.

Indirectly to prevent this type of murder, the rapes and sundry other violence and criminality, Starmer’s regime is seeking to break up the smuggling gangs, although its efforts are not exactly bearing much fruit.

According to the BBC, the government is “rapidly accelerating” work with countries, including Germany, to “crack down on the criminal smuggling gangs”, although it concedes that “there is always more to do together”.

The French authorities, who are on the front line of the battle – if they can be described as such – seem keen to finger the Germans. Pascal Marconville, a prosecutor in northern France, says: “It is important to demonstrate to the Germans that these boats are linked to offences on our coasts, which will allow them to intervene”.

Berlin’s interior ministry claims that bilateral cooperation is “very good”, with the German authorities prepared to take action at the request of the UK. A spokesman adds that, while it isn’t illegal to aid smuggling from Germany to the UK, it is punishable to aid smuggling to Belgium or France, where Channel crossings take place.

From there, we get a dose of extruded verbal material from Starmer’s official spokesman, on the need to “to step up our approach on enforcement, and that goes to other countries”. We need, he says, “to keep pace with the scale of their activity, and it’s something that we’ll be working very closely with the Germans and others on”.

On Friday 4 October, home secretary, Yvette Cooper, agreed to a major international plan to smash criminal gangs responsible for smuggling illegal migrants into G7 nations, including the UK and Germany. But the big problem, is that – rather like the trade in illegal drugs – the profits are so huge that, as fast as one gang is broken up, another one steps up to take its place.

Actual control, as we all know, is going to be difficult – as it has been for years, not helped by the complexity of the issues. The Migration Observatory is not that helpful in this respect, its research suggesting that policy is not the most important factor influencing changes in the number of people claiming asylum. Global developments, such as conflicts in countries of origin, it says, appear to be statistically more important.

Decisions about where and how to move depend on a range of factors, with the presence of friends and family members in the UK playing an important role. For example, the most common nationalities crossing the Channel have larger diaspora populations in the UK rather than in France.

Other factors include language and cultural links UK, perceptions of the UK as safe, welcoming, and democratic, as well as negative experiences in other European countries.

It is probably significant that prospective asylum seekers often know little about the policies that will face them when they arrive. The information they have may be inaccurate or misleading and not particularly detailed. In some cases, it seems, the decision to come to the UK is influenced more by smugglers, agents, or handlers than by the migrants themselves.

That being the case, it seems that we can expect constant waves of dinghy people reaching our shores and, as long as government lay out the welcome mats, they will keep coming. Eventually, it may dawn on a government that the only way forward is to return the dinghy people from whence they came, but such a policy doesn’t look like happening in a hurry.

Such is the profile of this issue, though, that unchecked numbers is politically unsustainable. Even Labour must produce results or take the flak. When its current policy fails dismally, as indeed it must, it will be interesting to see the reactions.