Johnson, speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, said he felt “a great deal of sympathy with those who are so desperate as to put their children in dinghies or even children’s paddling pools and try to cross the Channel.”

But the migrants, he said, were “falling prey to criminal gangs, and they are breaking the law. They’re also undermining the legitimate claims of others who would seek asylum in this country.”

Johnson said that because Britain is leaving the European Union, it will soon be able to write its own laws governing how asylum seekers are treated.

“We will address the rigidities in our laws that make this country, I’m afraid, a target and a magnet for those who would exploit vulnerable people in this way,” he said.

French aid workers say that most of the migrants attempting the crossing come from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Oman.

Despite France’s robust asylum infrastructure, many migrants still aspire to enter Britain because of family connections and because English is the strongest second language most of them speak, the aid workers say.

As the numbers have risen, French authorities also have cracked down on migrants exiting France: Ten times as many crossings were stopped in July 2020 compared with July 2019, according to a figures collected by France Info.

The British Home Office’s new Clandestine Channel Threat commander, Dan O’Mahoney, told Parliament on Thursday that French authorities, on their side of the Channel, had stopped 3,000 people from making the journey in 2020.

Police have also continued to dismantle the makeshift migrant camps that frequently crop up in Calais on France’s northern coast, the most common point of departure for migrants seeking to enter Britain, either by sea or smuggled onto trucks or trains using the Eurotunnel. Until October 2016, Calais was the site of the “Jungle,” a sprawling camp that housed about 9,000 migrants at its peak until French authorities dismantled it.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, aid workers in the area have pushed authorities to find suitable housing alternatives for migrants evicted from camps.

A young man from Sudan was found dead on a French beach Aug. 19 after a raft he and a friend had stolen, and rowed with shovels as oars, floundered in the waves. French police initially believed that the victim was a teenager, but it was later revealed that the migrant was a 28-year-old named Abdulfatah Hamdallah who recently had learned that French courts had rejected his 2018 asylum claim, according to the BBC.

McAuley reported from Paris. Siobhán O’Grady in Washington contributed to this report.

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William Booth

William Booth is The Washington Post’s London bureau chief. He was previously bureau chief in Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Miami.Follow

James McAuley

James McAuley is Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. He holds a PhD in French history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.Follow

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/britain-deploys-military-drones-to-stop-migrants-in-rafts-from-crossing-english-channel/2020/09/03/0709643c-edf7-11ea-bd08-1b10132b458f_story.html

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