As many as two thousand people, who as I understand it are immigrants from outside the EU, have attempted to enter the Chunnel over the last couple of nights to cross from France to the UK.
These are people who have already made it to France. What is is so much more attractive to them about the UK that it is worth risking their lives and freedom over?
Less racism, nicer cops, better labor market, less onerous labor regulations which makes businesses more willing to hire marginal people, family/community members already established and available as support/info network.
Maybe they speak English better than French.
That too, yes.
“They mostly seek to enter the British labour market, where unemployment is much lower than in France, to work illegally rather than claim asylum in France,[2][5]”
“Bouchart took issue with the immigration policy of the UK which, she complained, was “considered as an Eldorado” by immigrants.”
"But the French government has also called upon Britain to tighten its controls, warning that migrants still see the British illegal job market as the promised land.
Many of the migrants in the jungle say that with no identity card system, Britain is a much easier place for an illegal immigrant to find work."
This is certainly part of it for many. Plus employment prospects are viewed as better. If you’re coming from a country which happily persecutes its citizens, Britain’s image is one of freedom and fair treatment before the law.
From an old Telegraph article:
We are all aware of the US’s long held reputation for freedom and ‘the land of opportunity’. The UK is the European equivalent, in the eyes of those trying to get in from France.
The right wing press in this country like to tout the idea that they are coming for our welfare benefits, but I have always assumed that immigrants who have risked everything to get here would prefer to work.
and let’s not forget the food, the weather and the joie de vivre, innit.
And the Bull Ring.
Hey, it’s right posh at the Bull Ring nowadays, you’ve been away too long.
Because the rest of their bloody family is already here.
Seriously, go and work for Uber in Paris instead.
What, is it all paved now? 
OI ! Fook right off, mate ! Y’forgot about the cordiality, ye fookin’ bassard ye.
With gold, my boy, with gold
Also because Europe is not the Eldorado they had been dreaming of. So they come to Greece and that’s shit, they go on to Italy and that’s shit too, on to France – merde; now they’re stuck in France, no job, no money, they sleep on the streets, people hate them, they can’t go back to Africa. What are they gonna do? See if it’s better in the UK.
Most migrants want to move to a country where they will find a support network, where people they can rely on like relatives or people from the same village or region are already living. A Pakistanese illegally entering France is unlikely to stay there for this reason : he will probably try to enter the UK. Note by the way that before ending up in France those people also crossed other European countries.
Illegal immigrants are safer in the UK : they won’t be caught in a random ID check (because Britons have no ID cards or ID checks), contrarily to what could happen in France.
The economic situation is better in the UK at the moment : the unemployment rate is significantly lower than in France.
Having said that, the UK has an institution designed make life very difficult for asylum seekers: The Home Office. They can find themselves on a Kafkaesque legal labyrinth where their documents are regularly lost by this government agency, their cases may take years to be resolved and there is always the threat of being sent to a ‘removal centre’ for deportation. They may be in one of these prisons for years. While waiting for their cases to come up they have to live in a hostel with others, they are not allowed to work and they live off vouchers that can be cashed at the local supermarket.
If they avoid the authorities and try to find a job on the black market, they live in fear of a raid by the Border Agency and deportation. The same applies to accommodation. They live in fear of the dawn raid by a team of Robocops smashing down the doors looking in the early morning looking for suspects.
Despite all this, the number of police in the UK is far less than in France, the principle of community policing by consent ensures the police are naturally better behaved, they don’t have guns and they are sensitive to the established immigrant communities who have political influence. They may have family networks that show them how the system works and how to keep your head down.
The UK benefits from this by having a large number of people working under the radar doing all the shitty jobs no-one else wants to do. I am sure some businesses would grind to a halt of they did not have the ability to hire people at below the minimum wage.
Living in illegal and over-crowded houses, being charged a ridiculous rent for squalid conditions and having deductions from your pay for some bus service that ships people out to do back breaking work in agriculture or meat packing. Sending your money home to pay for off the large debt paid to the people smugglers.
The UK government has passed a lot of laws aimed at illegal immigrants trying to make life more difficult. Landlords, employers, hospital staff and teachers are supposed to check the immigration status of tenants, employees, patients and students to ensure they have legal status in the UK. Funnily enough, landlords and public employees are not at all happy about being turned into immigration police.
It can be a grim life for a refugee. But look at the countries where they come from and it is not difficult to see the reasons why. Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria. These are dangerous, war torn countries.
Other European countries have their own policies for refugees and asylum seekers and they all agonise about what is the best policy. In fairness, many do accept much larger numbers through official channels. The UK is not particularly generous in this respect but it does have a functioning health, welfare and education system. Public polices are rather more laissez-faire and far less regulated than is usual with the Continental regimes. Southern Europe especially has very poorly developed social and welfare services.
Refugees head for the northern countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK and Germany. However, if they get arrested en-route, the arrangement is that they are supposed to be returned to the EU country they first landed.
This is a major issue. Greece, Italy and Spain on the main migrant routes are not at all happy about this. If they can get into the UK, without coming to the notice of the authorities in the countries en-route, the UK has to take responsibility for them. Many of the other countries of the EU are in a free movement area known as the Shengen area, so there often no checks at all when crossing borders. The UK does not partake of that has full immigration checks. At Calais there is an arrangement for UK officials to check travel documents and for French official to do the same at Dover before people and trucks cross the channel. If you can dodge that and make it to Dover, that is a home run.
Dover-Calais ferry services and Eurotunnel and is the major channel crossing handing big trucks carrying goods between the UK and Europe. Lots of potential hiding places in the trucks and big finger pointing exercise between the UK and French authorities regarding who has to pay for all the security. Truck drivers can be fined £2000 if they are found with stowaways.
There is also the issue of French industrial disputes at Calais over pay. When they French go on strike some workers have a tendency to resort to vandalism and they have broken through security fences and made fires on the road at the entrance to the Eurotunnel.
It is a nightmare at the moment and is really causing a lot of problems for businesses and holiday makers who use this route.
At least the UK does not have to deal with hundreds of dead bodies of drowned refugees that Italy has washed up on its shores.
No, the situation in Calais has been going on for years and the people involved are pretty much 100% on primary immigration - their destination has always been the UK.
What you describe is secondary immigration. A common case of secondary is people who move to a country’s capital or another big immigration focus and after a while realize that the provinces may actually work better. For example in Spain many people from Africa go to the agricultural areas of the Plastic Sea or the Maresme, many Asians and Latin Americans to Madrid, but they move to other areas after a while. People who already speak Spanish (from Latin America, Equatorial Guinea, our former protectorates in current Morocco) and retirees are the ones most likely to have an original destination other than Madrid or the greenhouses.
This is the Dublin agreement between EU states regarding the allocation of responsibility of asylum seeking refugees.
http://www.ecre.org/topics/areas-of-work/protection-in-europe/10-dublin-regulation.html
There is a strong incentive to avoid claiming refugee status until you reach your target country.
Calais is the best place to try, if you want to hide in a truck to the UK. Part of the reason for this might be that the crossing by the Channel tunnel is very quick, it takes about 30minutes. When you are hanging on for dear life under a truck or risking suffocation inside, the shorter the journey the better. Trucks are driven into special enclosed vehicle-carrying train wagons and shuttled across to the other side. The driver usually sits in his cab, but you can walk around. At the other side they drive off the train and from Dover enter the UK motorway network. Once through to the UK, stowaways, bail out and either claim asylum at a police station or make contact with their relatives and family networks (or their people traffickers) and go underground.
It certainly has been going on for a long time, but the events in Syria and other countries produce waves of refugees. To reach Calais refugees will have had to endure a perilous journey and suffered many privations along the way.
The UK has made it progressively more difficult for refugees to go through official channels and there is no agreement with other EU states about how many each country should take. So these people smuggling routes become more heavily used.
There is a lot of money to be made by criminal networks that specialise in this business.
The major routes:
Another reason for increase at Calais is that people smuggling is seasonal. It is easier to get a boat rickety boat across the Mediterranean during the summer season than braving the bad weather and cold at other times of year.
The numbers at Calais are a few thousand trying to get to the UK. But across the whole of Europe it is 217,000. This is tiny in comparison to the 4 million refugees that sit in camps in countries adjacent to war zones like Syria. Every time you hear about some action by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there are streams of refugees pouring over the borders into Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon. I guess, they hope to go home again as soon as it is safe. The rest of the world helps these countries to deal with this through the UNHCR.
http://www.unhcr-northerneurope.org/in-focus/the-crisis-in-syria/
Europe is pretty divided about how to handle this situation. Politicians have address the immigration/refugee question and they are threatened by single issues parties with a strong anti-immigration agenda. In the UK this debate is often conflated with an anti-EU agenda. As far as the older generation is concerned, they are all foreigners and there too many of them trying to get into the UK.
The political response in the UK seems to be that the best thing to do is pay for bigger and stronger fences to be built in Calais while doing a lot of finger waving at the French.
Here is the voice of Nigel Farage giving his little Englander assessment of the situation.
Correct, secure the borders and make it impossible for migrants to disrupt the cross-channel services.
As for finger-pointing at the French. How many of these migrants have been arrested, processed and deported by the French? The standard procedure is to move them on in the vague hope that they end up being someone else’s (i.e. UK’s) problem.
The same attitude can be seen towards striking workers blockading and damaging the access roads and tracks by burning tyres. You’d think they’d be hauled away and banged up immediately but the French police simply stand and watch and protect them.
Anyone who reaches France (or anywhere in the EU) and has a desire to claim asylum should claim asylum at the first possible opportunity. If they are successful then what would be stopping them from eventually getting to their desired end destination of the UK? I suspect the vast majority are simply looking to move for an easier life. Can’t blame them but nor can you just open your doors to all that would wish to do so. There has to be restriction and an enforced process regarding who gets genuine asylum and who is allowed in as a valued economic migrant. Using the Channel tunnel as a sort of deadly “Total Wipeout” style application process is not the way to do it.
The moment someone lands in a free democratic nation and refuses to claim the asylum they profess to want…any subsequent claim they make further down the road should be automatically denied and then they should swiftly be deported to the country they claim to come from.
How much hay are the extreme right making out of this?
Especially the assertion that these dirty, unwashed brown people are seeking the UK because the UK has already allowed other brown people to settle?
I seem to recall a discussion about the term “Paki” to mean Pakistani and if that term was motivated by racism.
(didn’t the Empire once assert that all subjects were free to move anywhere in the Empire?
Yes, I am an old USAer who remembers hearing that in grade school in the 1950’s.)
That is not as easy as you seem to think. Under international law France can send immigrants back to their country of origin and that country is obliged to take them in. The catch is that they need to have papers proving their citizenship of that country. And since these immigrants usually have no interest in providing (or even possessing) papers and their home countries usually have no interest in issuing them, that area is often closed. So the whole “deportation” thing simply does not work.