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Experts demand safe routes to UK after 400 people die at the border [1]

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Date: 2024-02 

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.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/migrants-cross-channel-small-boats-deaths-border-need-safe-routes-asylum/

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