In 2023, the United Kingdom recorded 29,437 migrant arrivals in small boats, compared to 45,000 last year. If the strengthening of the security system on the French coasts surely contributed to this fall, it is mainly explained by changes in migratory dynamics.
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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can show his satisfaction. A few days before the end of the year, the United Kingdom will record a significant drop in the number of migrant crossings in “small boats” (inflatable boats) in the Channel in 2023. Some 29,437 migrant arrivals were recorded by the British Home Office over the year, compared to more than 45,000 in 2022, a drop of a third. Enough to comfort the conservative leader, who has made the fight against illegal immigration one of his priorities, despite several recent setbacks, such as in the Rwanda issue.
Network dismantling strategy
Certainly, the bad weather conditions this summer in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais did not favor crossings. But above all the United Kingdom seems to be reaping the fruits of its heavy investments in the militarization of its maritime border at Calais, within the framework of the Le Touquet agreements signed in 2003. Last March, the British and the French also signed a new financial agreement worth 500 million euros over four years. Barbed wire, thermal cameras, increase in law enforcement… Since 2017, 425 million euros have been spent to strengthen the border and prevent migrants from crossing it, according to a report published by French researchers in February 2022 .
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“There has been a massive strengthening of the police presence and the fight against migrant smugglers,” explains Mehdi Benbouzid, public prosecutor of Saint-Omer, specializing in the fight against smuggler networks. There is a strategy of dismantling the networks which is of a judicial nature, and another of preventing departures which is managed by the prefectural body. It is the latter which is considerably reinforced, in particular thanks to English financing. At the same time as we fight against departures, we fight against smugglers. It’s this combination that makes it pay off in 2023.”
Fall in number of Albanian asylum seekers
However, a completely different factor was decisive in the decline in the number of small boats. In 2022, almost a third of the 45,000 arrivals concerned Albanians, often single adult men. With 48% of asylum applications accepted in 2022, Albanians have never had a better chance of being regularized in the United Kingdom. For comparison, France accepted only 9% of Albanian asylum requests in 2022 and Germany, 0%.
But after a peak in the summer of 2022, during which Albanians represented up to 50% of “small boat” passengers, their arrivals “fell spectacularly in the last quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023”, notes the Oxford University Migration Observatory. According to the Euractiv website, only 29 Albanians crossed the Channel by boat during the first three months of 2023, compared to 12,310 for the whole of 2022. “We no longer meet any Albanians in Calais”, Axel confirms to us Gaudinat, coordinator of the Calais branch of Utopia 56, an association helping migrants.
For Madeleine Sumption, political scientist and director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, “the reason for this sudden drop in the number of Albanians is not entirely clear, just as it is not clear why so many Albanians suddenly started arriving in the summer of 2022.”
Agreements between London and Tirana
Part of the explanation is surely found in the signing of agreements, in December 2022, between the United Kingdom and Albania to combat illegal immigration. As part of this cooperation, London was able to send officers from its border police to Tirana airport, in Albania, and strengthened its criteria for an asylum seeker to be considered a victim of modern slavery. With these new measures, “the vast majority of asylum applications from Albanians can simply be declared clearly unfounded,” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said at the time.
A statement that does not convince Madeleine Sumption: “The United Kingdom deported more people to Albania, but this mainly concerned Albanians with criminal records who were returned from British prisons, and not people who had recently crossed the border. Channel aboard ‘small boats’. We believe other factors are at play, such as a change in Albanians’ perception of the welcome they receive in the UK.”
With a national poverty rate of 20%, Albania has been emptying its young people for several years and is failing to contain this exodus. A reservoir of migrants from which smuggler networks in the north of France have taken advantage. According to a BBC investigation, many Albanians were offered a discount on the fare of crossing to the United Kingdom by traffickers in exchange for their services in drug trafficking upon arrival in England. A decision that is all the easier to make as Albanians are exempt from visas for stays of less than three months in France. With the virtual disappearance of Albanian asylum seekers, the United Kingdom finally returned to its level of 2021 when 28,526 arrivals were recorded in “small boats”.
