Nearly 1,300 illegal Channel crossings in one day, this Monday, August 22.
Some 1,295 migrants crossed the Channel on Monday on small English boats to reach the coast, a new one-day record reached despite successive plans by the British Conservative government to curb the phenomenon, according to London.
These crossings took place on board 27 boats and tested the previous record dating from November last year, said the British Ministry of Defense. It brings to 22,670, according to the Press Association count, the number of migrants who have made this very dangerous journey since the beginning of the year, against only 12,500 on the same date in 2021.
Over the whole of 2021, 28,500 people arrived in the United Kingdom in this way, marking a record since the surge in these crossings in 2018 in the face of the increasing lockdown of the French port of Calais and the Channel Tunnel.
A recent British parliamentary report estimates that the total could reach 60,000 people this year despite repeated promises from the British Conservative government, which has made the subject a priority since Brexit, to give France millions of pounds and then help it to strengthen the surveillance of the coasts and increase the measures to harden the reception of migrants.
London has concluded a very controversial agreement with Rwanda to send asylum seekers who arrived illegally on British soil to this East African country. Although none of these expulsions has yet taken place – a first flight scheduled for June was canceled after a decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) – the candidates for the succession of Boris Johnson, Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have promised to continue this policy.
Another setback in British migration policy, the government has just abandoned its plan to convert a former air force base in northern England into a center for asylum seekers, as is done in Greece.
At least 203 people have died or gone missing, at sea or on land, trying to reach England from the northern coast of France since 2014, including 27 in a single day at the end of 2021 in a shipwreck, according to the “International Organization for Migration (IOM).