The British Government presents this Tuesday in Parliament a bill that aims to combat illegal crossings in the English Channel, the route chosen by thousands of people to enter the United Kingdom and which often ends in tragedy.
If passed next week, the new law will ban illegal migrants from applying for asylum in the UK and anyone arriving in the south of England aboard rubber dinghies will be removed from the country as quickly as possible and permanently barred from returning. .
The move will be one of the government’s top priorities, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in an interview with the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
“Illegal immigration is not fair to British taxpayers, it is not fair to those who come here legally and it is not right to allow criminal gangs to continue their immoral trade,” he said.
“I am determined to keep my promise to stop the ships. Make no mistake, if they come to the UK illegally, they won’t be able to stay.”
Clare Moseley, from the organization Care4Calais, does not believe in the effectiveness of the measure. “For the last 10 years, our government has adopted deterrence-based policies and none of them have had an impact on the number of people crossing the canal. Why should this time be any different?”
At a time when the UK is grappling with a crisis brought on by rising inflation, Sunak’s government has been under pressure to find a solution to the wave of migrants pouring into the country each year.
This after the controversial agreement signed between London – still under the leadership of Boris Johnson – and Rwanda to welcome immigrants of various nationalities from the United Kingdom. The measure consisted of sending single men who crossed the English Channel illegally to Rwanda while their asylum claims were being processed.
More than 45,000 people crossed the strait between southern England and northern France last year. In 2021, a year marked by the death of 27 migrants in a shipwreck at the end of November, more than 28,500 people completed the crossing, triple the 8,466 in 2020.
Source: TSF
