Nearly 200,000 illegal boat migrants have successfully crossed the English Channel from France since the government began tracking the emergency, as hundreds more flooded across the waterway over the weekend.
According to calculations from official Home Office statistics done by The Sun, 199,828 illegals have crossed the Channel in small boats over the past eight years, with most of the illegal arrivals occurring over the past five years.
The grim milestone came after 422 migrants crossed the Channel on Sunday in six small boats, or an average of 70 per vessel. Further arrivals on Monday may have pushed the total number of known migrant boat arrivals to 199,920. Official government numbers for boat migrant arrivals for the last 48 hours have not yet been published.
While boat migrant arrivals have run at astonishing levels for years, a harsh contrast is apparent when compared to the number of those arrivals the government has successfully deported in the same period. Out of those 200,000, just 7,612 boat migrants were deported, or less than four per cent of the total number of arrivals.
Long experience shows many avoid deportation by immediately claiming asylum once on British soil, despite having come from a safe, first-world EU nation in France.
The farcical nature of the crisis is compounded by the fact that many of the illegals are actually escorted by the French Navy into British territorial waters, where they are often picked up by the UK Border Force or Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), who take them ashore at the port of Dover, instead of pushing them back to France.
While the French claim that it would go against their laws to force migrants back to the beach, Paris has had no qualms about demanding billions in payments from the British taxpayer to supposedly police the coastline around Calais and other migrant crossing hotspots, which still see tens of thousands of crossings, regardless.
Despite having entered the country illegally, their dubious asylum claims afford them many privileges in Britain, including access to taxpayer-funded accommodation, a weekly cash stipend, access to National Health Service (NHS) healthcare, free dental care, and education for their children.
Due to the massive influx of illegals via the English Channel, which occurred alongside the Chinese coronvairus crisis, the former Conservative government began housing migrants in hotels across the country at taxpayer expense.
The programme, which has persisted under the Starmer Labour government and which is currently housing upwards of 30,000 migrants, has become deeply controversial, with locals often raising concern about the safety risks posed by importing hundreds of typically unvetted young male migrants into their communities.
National protests against the scheme broke out last year following the sexual assault of a young girl in Epping by an illegal hotel migrant from Ethiopia who landed on British shores just days before on a small boat.
In response to the national backlash, Prime Minister Starmer’s government has put in motion plans to place migrants in private housing, spreading them into more communities and removing them from a central location around which protests could form, and locals could perhaps avoid.
Shadow Home Secretary for Reform UK, Zia Yusuf, said of the Channel crisis: “This isn’t migration, it’s an invasion enabled by the weak, feeble leadership of successive Conservative and Labour governments. Only Reform UK has the courage to shut this down and deport those breaking into this country illegally.”
The Nigel Farage-led party has vowed to strip asylum status from most illegal migrants that arrived over the past five years, end permanent residency status for migrants and replace it with a U.S.-style work visa programme, carry out mass deportations, and leave the deportation-blocking European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This week, the party said that it would specifically locate deportation centres in areas that back the pro-open borders Green Party.