Less than two weeks after a shipwreck that led to the death of twelve people on Tuesday, September 3, 2024, eight new deaths occurred on the Franco-British border during the night of Saturday, September 14 to Sunday, September 15. This brings the number of victims on this border since January to at least 51, making 2024 one of the deadliest years in terms of this sad count.
Since 1999, that is, since the year the “Camp de Sangatte” near Calais opened – which was able to accommodate nearly 67,000 people before its highly publicized closure in 2002 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior – the Franco-British border will have killed at least 445 people. The bourgeois press, which only takes up the subject when the number of deaths is impressive, treats the event as usual either as a news item, or as a dramatic illustration of an overly lax migration policy through its consequences.
Let us say it clearly again: the deaths at the Franco-British border are not the result of chance; in the same way, if they do illustrate a migration policy, it is not one of a lack of firmness towards people smugglers and exiled people, quite the contrary. As we repeated again at the beginning of August, the 445 deaths at the Franco-British border are the result of a series of political choices that have precisely led to an increased militarization of the border, which has the sole effect of pushing those who want to cross to England to take ever greater risks in order to do so.
According to figures from the Channel and North Sea Maritime Prefecture, for example, 18 attempted crossings by “small boat” took place on the night of Friday 13 to Saturday 14 September alone, with a total of nearly 200 shipwrecked people rescued. Similarly, over the last six years, the United Kingdom has recorded 136,000 arrivals on its soil by means of these small boats, including 20,000 for the current year. Far from preventing crossings, therefore, nor a fortiori from slowing down attempts, the militarization of borders has only had the effect of dramatically changing the strategies put in place by exiles. Thus, with the bunkerization of port terminals, as well as those of the Channel Tunnel, its main effect has been to increasingly encourage departures by “small boat”, whereas in the past exiled people would rather try to cross by hiding in trucks accessing these terminals.
Today, we also see that it has another effect: attempts to leave further and further south along the coast of Pas-de-Calais and the North, as far as the Bay of Somme, in order to escape the militarized places on the border (Calais and Dunkirk). Necessarily lengthening the crossing by several kilometers, it makes it even more perilous, as the Utopia 56 association explained again this summer.
As the various European governments are increasingly reinforcing their borders, as France has adopted a new “immigration” law which risks increasing expulsions, particularly from the Franco-British border, and as we know that a new CRA in Dunkirk will soon complete the militarization of the latter, it is more urgent than ever to fight for freedom of movement and settlement, the opening of borders and the end of xenophobic policies which kill.
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