Anybody contemplating a booze cruise to the Calais hypermarkets or a short break in France via Eurotunnel will surely be thinking again this weekend. Even motorists have become targets for the more than 1,000 migrants who have gathered in the French port seeking a passage to Britain. The last thing returning travellers want to find is an illegal immigrant in the boot.
Natacha Bouchart, the mayor of Calais, is clear on where the blame lies: Britain. “We really want the UK government to think about the English rules, which are possibly the best for immigrants in Europe,” she said. “We want the government to make it less attractive, to be less soft.”
Her comments will be music to the ears of those who think Britain has a benefits system which is too attractive to immigrants and a porous system of border controls. She says Britain should take on the job of carrying out passport checks on the migrants and foot the £12m security bill.
While there is always room for improvement, however, and while the image of Britain as the land of milk and honey for migrants persists, Mrs Bouchart has chosen the wrong target. Her anger should be directed towards her own government and François Hollande, France’s accident-prone and beleaguered president.
Lord Howard, the former Conservative party leader and home secretary, put it well in a BBC interview yesterday. While sharing the Calais mayor’s frustration, he pointed out correctly that the problem has arisen because of Europe’s Schengen agreement.
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“The general principle which every member state of the European Union has subscribed to is that people fleeing persecution should apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach,” he pointed out.
France, as Lord Howard noted, used to meet its obligations. When he was home secretary in the 1990s it was agreed that asylum seekers who came to Britain from France would be immediately returned and their claim dealt with by France, Now that has broken down because other signatories to Schengen — all but six members of the EU — are not effectively controlling their borders. This was what lay behind the threat of former president Nicolas Sarkozy to withdraw France from Schengen in 2012.
The police need to do more to restrict the trafficking gangs responsible for some of the flows of illegal immigrants across borders. But, most importantly, EU countries must stop playing pass the parcel. They would police their borders more seriously if they had to deal with the consequences of large numbers of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The problem in Calais is the tip of a very large iceberg.