In 2024, at least 69 people died trying to cross the Channel by boat. Overall, around 81 people died attempting to cross informally from France to the UK. These people were just trying to find safe haven. The vast majority of people crossing the Channel informally are seeking sanctuary in the UK, desperately hoping for a chance to rebuild their lives. 2024 was deadliest year on record for them.
Their deaths are a direct result of government policies that seek to crack down on migration, heavily securitise borders, and punish refugees for the realities of forced displacement. Making other routes across the Channel more difficult to traverse has pushed people seeking asylum to take small boats. In 2019, shortly after Channel crossings came to widespread public attention, government officials actually boasted that increased securitisation of lorry crossings and the Channel Tunnel had been a key factor in forcing people seeking asylum to take small boats. The use of thermal imaging technology to find people hiding in the backs of lorries forces people to use refrigerated lorries to avoid detection. In these, they are at high risk of suffocation. As the UK government touts a continentally-coordinated effort to “stop the supply” of small boats, smugglers cram more people onto the fewer boats there are, increasing the chances of drowning. Laws and policies designed to turn our borders into a fortress are killing people.
This week, the government announced that it will “develop legislation for a new sanctions regime specifically targeting irregular migration and organised immigration crime.” It insists that “This will help to prevent, combat, deter and disrupt irregular migration and the smuggling of migrants into the UK”. Yet this is vanishingly unlikely, given a lack of evidence that heavy border securitisation deters desperate people from trying to cross borders, and a lot of evidence that it hugely endangers their lives. Our laws and policies prioritise border control over human life. Further, performative cruelty increasingly appears to be the underlying purpose of anti-refugee laws and policies, since they are effective at nothing else. It in unsurprising that a politics that is absolutely determined to be cruel to refugees is very ready to recklessly endanger their lives.
In the recent announcement, the Prime Minister explains “My government will do everything in our power to save lives and protect our borders for years to come.” But if the government does not take a radically different approach to borders, making it easier for refugees to access the UK, and ceasing to penalise them for how they do so, saving lives is impossible. We must urgently ask ourselves what matters to us. We must urgently ask how much we value human beings. We must ask, put simply, if it is acceptable to drown them in order to prevent them from asking for sanctuary here.
