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Has the UK ever managed to control Channel crossings? [1]

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Date: 2024-02 

UK politicians have been promising to crack down on irregular migration for decades. In recent years, that has largely meant trying to stop the “small boats crisis” in the English Channel. They’ve thrown millions of pounds at the problem and made deal after deal with France, but people keep coming.

Some get caught, some get across, and some die in the process. According to the investigation we are now releasing in collaboration with the French outlet Les Jours, some 391 migrants have died on this border region in the past 25 years. It’s clear that no matter what the government does, people keep trying to get across.

So what’s going wrong? The answer lies in the deadly relationship between borders, irregular migration, and smuggling.

Modern states have border controls to stop movement, but people continue to move anyway. The borders just make that movement harder than it otherwise would be. And when the controls become strong enough that people can’t bypass them on their own, smugglers enter the picture to facilitate their passage.

In response, states tend to introduce even stricter border controls. This makes the journey more difficult and more dangerous, so smugglers’ services become more necessary. They get more business and can charge more money. States respond by further fortifying the borders, and the spiral continues.

Nowhere are these dynamics more evident than in the English Channel.

The creation of a crisis

People have crossed the Channel without permission for centuries, with thousands of exiles arriving daily in some periods. But it was the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act that sowed the seeds of our current predicament.

Prior to this, all British subjects, including those residing in the Commonwealth or Crown Colonies, had freedom of movement into the UK. The 1962 act took away that right, primarily to stop non-white immigration. Overnight, people who had been moving to the UK freely from India or Pakistan, for example, found a border in the way.

This didn’t deter everybody though. People continued to try to make it to the UK, and in 1968 officials responded by establishing the Cross-Channel Intelligence Conference (CCIC) to foster cross-border policing. Now that they had made this movement illegal, they wanted police forces on both sides of the Channel to prevent it from happening.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/has-the-uk-ever-managed-to-control-channel-crossings/

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