Nearly 37,000 migrants arrived illegally in the United Kingdom across the Channel in 2024, a number up sharply from the previous year, according to British government figures.
Published on 01/01/2025 16:12
Updated on 01/01/2025 17:40
Reading time: 2min
The number of migrants arriving illegally in the United Kingdom by crossing the Channel on small boats has started to rise again in 2024, a particularly deadly year with around twenty shipwrecks and dozens of deaths. This increase increases pressure on Keir Starmer's Labor government, while the reduction in immigration, both legal and illegal, was one of the major issues of the electoral campaign that brought him to power in July, which also seen the breakthrough of the far-right Reform UK party.
Over the whole of 2024, 36,816 migrants managed to cross the Channel from France, or 25% more than in 2023, according to figures from the British Home Office published Wednesday January 1. However, this is less than the record reached in 2022 with 45,774 arrivals. Migrants pay thousands of euros to smugglers to be able to pile onto increasingly loaded inflatable boats.
With at least 76 deaths in around twenty shipwrecks, the year 2024 was the deadliest for migrants who are taking ever more risks to evade the surveillance of the authorities on this very secure border. According to the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, at least 5,800 people were rescued at sea in 2024 and more than 870 crossing attempts were prevented by law enforcement.
Difficult to explain the reasons “specific” of this resurgence, explains Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, a research center at the University of Oxford, interviewed by AFP. But the expert notes an increase in “October, November and December, a period when the numbers usually decrease because the weather is no longer as favorable”. In December alone, more than 3,200 migrants made the crossing.
