Eight migrants have died aboard a vessel attempting to cross the English Channel from France to Great Britain on 15 September. The boat had embarked from the Slack River between the coastal towns of Wimereux and Ambleteuse with 59 migrants from Eritrea, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran, quickly running aground in the turbulent waters of the Channel. Jacques Billant, the Prefect of the Pas-de-Calais region in which the vessel was discovered, said to French media that rescue crews were alerted that the boat was having troubles off the coast of Ambleteuse around one in the morning. According to a report from Al Jazeera, apart from the eight dead, six people were hospitalized with various ailments, including a ten-month-old baby with hypothermia, with the rest onboard in the care of rescue and medical crews from Pas-de-Calais. Maritime authorities say that migrants had made many attempts to cross the Channel, with 200 people rescued within 24 hours over that weekend alone.
According to Migration Watch UK, more than 20,000 illegal immigrants had made the dangerous trip across the English Channel in small boats, mostly inflatable dinghies, signaling their dire situation. French and British authorities both express sadness about the deaths, but do not offer assistance to migrants apart from prosecuting smugglers and rescuing migrants once they’re on the water, actions emblematic of the European tactic of avoiding the core issue and assigning blame on smuggling networks rather than preventing migration and assisting refugees within their states. According to Billant, French authorities had already dismantled 20 smuggling networks and arrested 77 people with the help of Europol forces from Germany and Belgium. Britain has been attempting similar efforts by arresting and trying smugglers in local courts, as well as tightening visa and asylum requirements to discourage immigration, to little avail.
The response to this issue of continued crossings across the English Channel though commendable as a demonstration of strong international cooperation between European states does little to tackle the root of the problem. At first glance, catching smugglers in the act using resources from Europol as well as the Belgian Federal Judicial Police of West-Flanders, the French Border Police, and the German Federal Police, as well as raiding hideouts of known smugglers, mainly in Germany, Iraq, and Turkey, and trying them in courts in, Dunkirk, Boulogne-Sur-Mer, and Saint-Omer, as well as courts in Bruges, Lille, and even German courts such as Düsseldorf, Hamm, Köln, Naumburg, and Bonn for more serious cases, according to a Europol report, suggests a strong focus on attempting to dismantle Iraqi-Kurdish smuggling networks found in France, Germany, and Belgium. Though investigation continue into discovering more and more smuggling rings, according to a story from LaCroix International, Guirec Le Bras, a prosecutor from Boulogne, offenders are often sentenced to prison for about a year. Despite the arrests, these highly organized smuggling networks with individual cells working across supply chain routes to get people from Northern Africa, the Middle East, and even Vietnam and Albania, as well as boats, lifejackets, and other items have continued operating. Though authorities claim they are catching not only low-level individuals, but also full participants in the trafficking networks, the ineffectiveness of such prosecution should signal some form of insufficiency in this strategy. Europe believes this tactic to be most effective, with Xavier Delrieu, head of the French Organization for Combatting the Illicit Trafficking of Migrants (OLTIM) doubling down with a new French law as of 26 January 2024, in which such trafficking has been deemed a crime punishable with up to 15 years in prison. Despite the ineffectiveness of the approach, European authorities believe this approach of raiding hideouts, arresting smugglers, and trying them in national courts to be their strongest capability against dismantling such migrant trafficking networks. The inadequacy in this approach stems not from inconsistencies in local and federal law or international cooperation between different high-level policing agencies, but from lacking provisions for immigration and entry, namely visa and asylum approval. Recent laws in Britain have made it significantly more difficult for visa-seekers to enter the country, often requiring them to fly into France and Belgium and attempt the dangerous crossing over the English Channel. Agreements between France and England and both Northern African countries as well as countries like Iraq, Turkey, and Albania have also been effective in returning many immigrants to those areas, or not allowing them to leave altogether. Regardless, immigration, as well as illegal crossings across the Channel, have continued unabated, simply made more dangerous and costly by the stricter immigration rules.
More than anything else, the issues with solutions are rhetorical in nature, demonizing migrants for trying to find a better life and villainizing smugglers, now treating them as criminals, for providing a well-organized service for migrants. Increasingly right-wing governments have been elected across Europe, using the immigration issue to boost their platforms and pushing for stronger national security. Instead of raiding smuggling networks and dismantling them from the inside while putting traffickers through the judicial process with little consequences or little change in the current state of illegal immigration, gentler approaches should be taken in curbing illegal immigration, often at the root of the problem. The most effective method would be to loosen both visa and asylum restrictions and to integrate asylum-seekers and visa-seekers into society. The most important method would be to reframe the issue not as one with illegal immigration and criminal traffickers, but one of refugees searching for a better living situation. Most illegal immigrants attempting to reach England are running from persecution, war, or attempting to find better education or living situations rather than the way they’re currently looked at by European authorities, as international criminals trying to escape prosecution or dangerous individuals who need to be expelled. In this way, the reframing of the issue may reliably allow for solutions such as refugee accommodation, like emergency shelters in Berlin, Köln, and Hamburg for asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Ukraine, as well as allow for local refugee organizations with already developed structures and solutions, such as the French Refugee Council or the UK’s Refugee Action, or even international agencies such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, or UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency to enter the conversation. Such organizations would not only attend to the criminalization of smuggling networks but would also have a much gentler approach to the treatment of refugees attempting to enter the EU. UK and French asylum laws may also be loosened to make it easier for such organizations to first house immigrants and find asylum for seekers. Visa restrictions could also be lifted once the issue is reframed through the refugee ideal, making it easier for individuals to get visas and later be integrated into society with the search for citizenship or alternate methods of creating a permanent life in European countries. The creation of easier methods of finding employment as refugees or specifically refugee oriented employment and living programs may assist in integrating individuals into society instead of requiring them to make illegal and often dangerous crossings over land, air, and sea borders only to be turned back by local authorities while losing hope of ever reaching their goal of simply living a better life than they have been capable of.
