You might have heard a lot about Calais in the news recently, or about what’s being called the Migrant crisis. But what is actually happening? Who are the people staying in Calais? And what can and should be done about them?
Just outside the northern French town of Calais, near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel to the UK, is a huge refugee camp. There are no precise figures for how many are there, but estimates put it around 3000 to 4000 people. All have fled from war-torn countries or from repressive dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East and, stowed away on lorries and boats, have crossed the Mediterranean and travelled through the EU. The Calais migrant camp represents the final stop on their intended journey to the UK, where they plan to finally claim asylum.
The number of migrants at Calais is at an all-time high, but the camp there is not new. In 1999 a refugee camp called Sangatte opened up the coast from Calais. It was designed to hold 800 people but numbers soon reached 2000. When it was finally closed in 2002 there were protests and riots. Since then, people have continued to arrive but have built their own makeshift camps instead. The next time the camp made major news headlines was in 2014 when 235 of these refugees stormed a ferry bound for the UK. The mayor of Calais began to complain that her city couldn’t handle the influx of people, and demanded that the UK government do more to help.
Since then the numbers have continued to rise. The UK’s Home Office says that Border Force and the French authorities together prevented over 39,000 attempts to cross the Channel in 2014/15. The company which operates the Tunnel says it stopped 37,000, while French police arrested more than 18,000 undocumented migrants in the first half of 2015. The response has been to increase security around the Tunnel. In September 2014 the UK government pledged £12 million to the French government over three years to help tackle the crisis. This summer they announced a further £2 million for a secure zone for UK-bound lorries, plus another £7 million for improved security at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. The Eurotunnel company has spent £9.2 million on security in the first half of 2015 alone, including money on fences, cameras, infrared detectors and extra security guards. There’s a 16ft fence topped with razor wire, with CCTV cameras and heavily armed riot police standing guard. An extra 120 French police have been deployed to Calais.
With the news focusing on these security measures, plus the disruption to Calais town life, to people’s holidays to the country and to lorry drivers in Kent, it’s easy to forget about the people in the camp themselves. They have faced a difficult and dangerous journey to get to Calais, and they now live there in conditions so appalling that the camp has become known as the ‘Jungle’. For the thousands of people in the camp there are only thirty toilets and very few showers, buildings are made of pieces of metal and tents, and conditions are dirty and squalid. Every night the refugees risk injury or death jumping onto moving trains going into the Tunnel, or try to jump security fences to reach UK-bound lorries. So why have they chosen to come to the camp, and why do they continue to put themselves at such risk just to reach the UK?
The answer is simple when you find out where most of the refugees have come from. Many are fleeing from violence in countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan. Syria has been gripped by civil war since 2011 when peaceful protests against the repressive regime were met with a violent crackdown from government forces. Large parts of Syria are now controlled by the extremist Islamic State. Although now recovering from almost three decades of war, Afghanistan continues to be a very dangerous place, and there remains a humanitarian crisis in the country. Eritrea has been called the ‘North Korea’ of Africa due to its incredibly repressive regime, responsible for widespread human rights violations.
The list goes on. Put simply, these people are desperate. Life in their homelands is at best difficult and at worst extremely dangerous, and they see no choice but to flee. Those who see the UK as the ideal location have ended up in Calais, but this actually represents a very small percentage of the total number of refugees in the EU. In 2014 31,745 people applied for asylum in the UK, but France had twice as many applicants and Germany six times as many. Those wishing to come to the UK have many reasons, among them that they speak English as a second language, already have family in the country, or feel that they have the best chance of getting a job and settling down here. Sadly, even those who do reach the UK are not guaranteed asylum here. Out of the 2014 applicants only 10,050 were accepted, with the rest sent back to their country of origin.
The crisis remains a divisive issue. This month a new deal has been signed between the UK and France to deal with the problem in Calais, but it is only a small part of an EU-wide issue with very complicated causes. It will require a huge humanitarian effort, as well as cooperation between many governments, if we are to solve it any time soon.
Image Denis Charlet/AFP: http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1440438/calais-migrants.jpg
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