Small boat crossings since the start of the year are at a record level. Yesterday 326 migrants arrived, bringing this year’s total to 3,224. Last year 2,983 migrants crossed the Channel over the same period. The number who have made the journey since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, having promised to ‘stop the small boat crossings’, is 24,666.
The figures are in stark contrast to the US, where Donald Trump recently announced that ‘the invasion of our country is over’ with attempts to illegally cross the US-Mexico border at a record low. Border agents had 8,326 encounters with migrants in February, Trump said; there were 190,000 in the same month last year.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was declaring a national emergency on the southern border. He cancelled settlement programmes, shut down an app that let migrants schedule appointments to make asylum claims before reaching the border and ordered officials to take ‘all necessary action to immediately repel, repatriate, and remove illegal aliens’. Since then, immigration authorities have doubled their number of new detentions and rumours about raids have seen neighbourhoods fall quiet. Over the last year, Mexico has also dispersed migrant caravans, bussed migrants south, and, after Trump threatened tariffs, deployed 10,000 national guards to the border. Crossings through the Darien gap have fallen 94 per cent to 72 a day, and now the news is about the flow of migrants reversing.
Yesterday the Home Office launched an advertising campaign in Iraq to deter channel crossings. It shows images of broken dinghies and warns of ‘disappearing into the sea’ – with arrival leading not to a ‘well-paid job… instead I was a slave’. That campaign follows similar ones in Albania and Vietnam. But judging by how many people have arrived on small boats so far this year, the message isn’t being widely heard. The US shows that migrants can be deterred – but it takes more than an ad campaign.
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