The most determined migrants in Europe are voting with their feet. They have made arduous journeys, mainly from Syria and the Horn of Africa. They have forced an entry to the first world and kept going. This week in Calais they have clambered over security fences, rushed en masse for Dover-bound ferries and been turned back only by riot police and fire hoses.
The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, and France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, blame Britain for attracting immigrants but failing to shoulder the burden they impose on neighbouring countries.
There is no question that this country’s border controls are too often shambolic and that it has a global reputation as a soft touch for refugees. But reputation is not the same thing as reality, and if Britain’s borders are too porous, the same is emphatically true of the rest of Europe. In the rolling crisis of illegal immigration the key differences between Britain and the continent are not administrative or political but economic. Some migrants come here intending to exploit an over-generous safety net. Most come to work. They stand a chance of finding it in Britain, but almost none in France, Spain, Greece or Italy.
Britain must respond to the emergency in Calais with more than words. However, until the map of economic opportunity driving migrants to these shores changes fundamentally, Mrs Bouchart is unlikely to be calmed.
Around 1,500 migrants are camped near Calais hoping somehow to reach Dover. Hundreds more arrive each week. Local police expect to be dealing with 5,000 by the end of the year. Mr Cazeneuve said yesterday that most of them regard Britain as an El Dorado and implored London to do more to disabuse them of this fantasy.
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On a strictly local level there is much that the Home Office should be doing in Calais, but is not. Standard passport and visa checks have been carried out in Calais rather than Dover since the introduction of “juxtaposed” border controls ten years ago, but British officials do little proactively on French soil to warn would-be stowaways of the risks of entering the UK illegally.
Most of those who cross the border claim asylum. British rules may give asylum seekers a more comfortable foothold than elsewhere while their cases are being considered, but it is a myth that they are drawn here in disproportionate numbers. Roughly 23,500 asylum applications were lodged here last year compared with 62,000 in France and 76,000 in Germany.
Mr Cazeneuve wants more British co-operation against human trafficking and a larger permanent British presence in Calais. These are reasonable requests. The home secretary must also urgently demonstrate, to reassure Britons as much as to deter hapless Somali migrants, that this country has a border control system fit for purpose — Labour’s “e-Borders” scheme to count migrants in and out foundered in a £500 million IT fiasco and has not been replaced.
At the same time, though, Britain must state clearly that Europe’s southern borders are barely policed and not remotely capable of holding back the tide of humanity driven north by hardship and violence since the Arab Spring. In the long run this tide must be reversed by investing in growth in the countries that fuel economic migration. Britain is doing this already. Europe must pitch in.