August might be the silly season, but there’s nothing funny about the awful images from Calais and Europe’s borders. Hundreds of people with nothing but the clothes on their backs and hope for the future. Their desperation is palpable and moving as European states struggle to move quickly enough to stem what is becoming a growing humanitarian crisis.
Take Calais. It is estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 live in ‘the Jungle’ camp in close proximity to the Euro Tunnel to the UK. As many as 1,400 attempts in a single night are made to escape through the raised fences towards the lorries and trains heading to Britain.
This is a crisis all right. But it did not happen overnight. I and others have called Calais at crisis point for a year. What is new is the size of the crisis, not the crisis itself.
A typical response from the British and French governments is to blame each other and hope this distracts attention from the difficult work of finding a solution. As the situation worsens, each side commits a few more people on the ground with greater resources to improve security. Things calm for a brief period and then get worse than before. Repeat.
This destructive cycle is on display once again now. Foreign secretary Philip Hammond even claimed the government had ‘a grip’ on the situation after promising a higher fence and more sniffer dogs, only to claim the next day that migrants were ‘marauding’ Europe and threatened our ways of life. Not a single journalist picked that up. Welcome to life under a Tory government with a Tory press.
And such is the sheer poverty of Tory thinking on immigration and security that sniffer dogs and a bit more fence is the best they can do for weeks at a time. It all makes you wonder how seriously the government really is taking the Calais migrant crisis.
Home secretary Theresa May is the first and only minister to visit Calais since the crisis began – and she only arrived yesterday. She nor any other senior minister thought it worth their while or attention. This should be enough to shock.
May and her French counterpart talked much this week about their excellent relations. Yes, relations so close they have been blaming each other rather than act since the crisis began and only now – now! – are launching a coordinated policing strategy bringing together personnel from each side. There will also be additional security around the site to safeguard it and the tunnel. It is unbelievable such measures were not in place months ago. Such is the low priority this humanitarian crisis is for the government.
I have been arguing for weeks in dozens of live interviews for the major broadcasters that any deal between the British and French could do no more than calm the situation in the short term. Even if everyone in the Jungle were relocated to a home of their choice, the problem would not go away in the medium to longer term because more people will continue to arrive in Calais.
Calais is a bigger problem than many think because it requires a coordinated strategy at the European Union level, something May appears to have only realised publicly this week. Some EU countries share Britain’s reluctance for greater migration while others welcome it. Illegal human trafficking is a problem not only for Greece and Italy, but eastern European countries, too. Because most of Europe is party to the Schengen agreement, there are generally free borders between many EU member states. This means that if you can get into an EU country, it can become easier to travel across. It is not easy to make a living by a long shot and many asylum-seekers lost their case – the UK alone rejected 60 per cent of everyone who applied for asylum. But there must be more coordination among EU member states about how they collectively tackle illegal human trafficking and they may need to revisit some light-touch checks internally. There are many other issues too, not least the heavy burden that states on Europe’s edges carry that others can avoid.
But again we see too little, too late. The government has been slow to act. It has been more quick at tough rhetoric than bringing relief on the ground. The agreement is an important step in the right direction.
But we must ask why it has taken the government so long to only get this far? Why has no minister visited the area to get a clearer handle on the problem and its possible solution? And why does this government continue to ignore the voices of migrants to the UK to help tackle illegal migration?
When I immigrated to the UK, I was met with surprise at the number of hurdles to permanent residency and citizenship and costs. Only listening to a few privileged voices that have never immigrated themselves will provide an insufficient perspective needed to truly get ‘a grip’ on a crisis that could soon become a calamity.
Consider the government’s lack of response to new official statistics. These show 330,000 net migration in the year up to March. Over eight million people have been born abroad. One key factor is fewer people, including British citizens born in the UK, are staying put and not leaving to find work and opportunities elsewhere.
I strongly suspect that this will prove a bigger headache for the government the more the overall economy improves. This will give incentives for people here to stay and for others to want to come here for work and study.
Again, if the government wants to get a grip on this, then it should begin by engaging with migrants like me that have come to the UK, that have become naturalised British citizens and integrated into British society. Rather than assume what migrants are thinking or doing, it would be better to find out directly and in partnership: better integration is good for all.
But this would require leadership and being proactive, instead of merely reacting to tabloid headlines. The biggest question of all is whether the government is willing to engage with migrants and develop a more reasonable approach, or will it keep burying its head in the sand and hope tomorrow the numbers will be different.
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Thom Brooks is professor of law and government at Durham University and a specialist in immigration law and policy. He is communications lead for Phil Wilson MP and Sedgefield constituency Labour party. He tweets at @thom_brooks