With the United Kingdom ready to leave the European Union on 31 January, the number of ship visits to the British coast has increased dramatically in recent months.
The Secretary General of the British Immigration Service, Lucy Moreton, told the British National Broadcasting Corporation that the number of arrivals “has increased significantly in the last couple of weeks. We usually see an increase in clandestine migration over Christmas – this has been the case for decades. But this is the first time we’ve seen that number increase quite sharply in small boats.
The British newspaper Independent reported that in 2019 an estimated 1,800 migrants crossed the English Channel – more than six times more than last year. Local authorities in northern France, meanwhile, reported to AFP that the number of migrants rescued while trying to cross the English Channel in 2019 was more than 2,358 – four times more than in 2018.
A total of 261 cases of crossing or attempted crossing were recorded by French and British authorities, most of them by small inflatable boats, which were often overloaded, AFP was told by the Channel Maritime Prefecture and the North Sea.
More attempts are expected before Brexit.
Moreton explained that traffickers are likely to use Brexit in the coming weeks to force more migrants to try to cross such irregular sea shipping. She told BBC Radio 4’s Segodnya programme that she found out “that smugglers and traffickers tell these people that Britain will somehow close down after Brexit.
“In practice, of course, it is still illegal, and on 31 January it will be as illegal as 1 February. Brexit doesn’t change anything, but we know that criminals are using this to try to scale up business”, – Moreton said.