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UK-France border: dying by the ferries at the Port of Calais [1]

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Date: 2024-02 

“Everyone is waiting to cross the border and go to England,” Hicham said. “I came all the way to Calais from Morocco. I assure you I'm going to burn that border right now.”

Mariam Guerey, a Caritas France employee, remembers Hicham's words well. It was autumn 2015, when nearly 10,000 people were crammed into a shantytown known as the Jungle on the outskirts of the city.

“Hicham had only arrived in Calais a few days earlier, but he sounded confident when he talked about the border,” Guerey said. “One evening he set off with a friend to try the passage. They had two life jackets, but one was defective. Hicham took it.”

Hicham and his friend climbed over the barriers surrounding the port and slid into the water. A few hundred metres away were the lights of the ferries, less than 50 kilometres beyond that was England. By boat the crossing takes an hour and a half.

The two swimmers soon found themselves in trouble, and in the darkness their silhouettes were barely visible. “It was a port employee, out for a cigarette, who saw Hicham's friend in the water and alerted the emergency services,” Guerey remembered. “He was saved.”

The fire department searched for hours, but found no trace of Hicham. His body was fished out five days later off the northern port of Gravelines, some 20 kilometres to the east.

Hicham died on 15 September 2015, at age 22. He is one of 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series.

The beginning of a tragedy

The water killed Hicham, but to understand why he entered it we must go back much earlier.

Migration, and migration control, in Europe entered a new phase in 1995, when European countries implemented the Schengen Agreement – a mobility treaty that abolished internal border controls between participating states. The British government chose not to be part of Schengen, and as a result the English Channel transformed overnight into an external border with a large (and rapidly expanding) area of free movement.

Suddenly, it was easier for people from much further away to make it to the UK’s doorstep. Some arrived without papers, and in response the English police at Dover began returning an increasing number of people back to France.

“At the time, they were mainly people from the Baltic States, Poland and Romania,” said Olivier Clochard, a geographer who studies this border. “Turning back migrants became more systematic with the creation of the Schengen Area.”

Those refused entry found themselves back in the port terminal at Calais.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/uk-france-border-migrants-dying-by-the-ferries-at-the-port-of-calais/

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