Migrants have long used Northern France, especially the port town of Calais, as a launching pad to sneak into the UK, either via the Channel vehicle tunnel or on ferries. The Maritime Prefecture for the English Channel and the North Sea warned the 2019 figure was more than four times bigger than the previous year’s count: 2,758 compared with 586 in 2018.
The French officials could not say whether the spike in attempts to reach Britain’s shores was linked to migrants fearing that Brexit might prompt tighter border controls.
It is not known how many migrants actually managed to cross over into the UK.
The maritime prefecture added in a Twitter post that 74 migrants had been rescued so far in 2020.
Migrants “are often badly equipped, in overloaded boats which aren’t made for this and are quickly going under” into freezing waters, prefecture spokesman Marine Monjardé later told AFP.
“What we are seeing is an explosion of the migratory pressure,” Marc Bonnafous, the head of the maritime search and rescue centre at Cap Griz-Nez, told France Bleu radio.
Both French and British customs agents and police patrol the port of Calais, France’s de facto border with Britain.
The passage, while a short distance, is riddled with risks. Thirty people died making the treacherous journey last year while seven were reported missing, the prefecture report said.
Small boats – often flimsy fishing boats or inflatable dinghies – can easily fail in the choppy waters of the English Channel, known for high winds and strong currents. Nearly 25 percent of the world’s maritime traffic passes through the Channel from France to Britain.
French authorities insist they take a hardline approach to discourage people from making the crossing.
Earlier this month, French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said France would tighten security at its northern ports and increase surveillance along beaches to counter the rise in illegal crossings.
“It is in our interests, as well as British interests, to do everything possible to prevent the development of new trafficking routes that might attract illegal migrants to our coast once again,” he said – a thinly veiled reference to the sprawling Jungle tent camp outside Calais that was demolished in late 2016.
A joint action plan to tackle the migrant problem signed by Paris and London last year includes broader intelligence sharing and the installation of CCTV cameras that can offer live feeds from ports and areas where migrants may attempt to embark boats in France.
Despite Brexit, Britain fulfils the migrants’ criteria of an Anglophone destination deemed more welcoming than mainland Europe, where they consider themselves unwanted and mistreated.