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UK Home Secretary Signs New Channel Migrant Deal With France

© AFP 2023 / SAMEER AL-DOUMYMigrants try to start an outboard engine after boarding a smuggler's boat on the beach of Gravelines, near Dunkirk, northern France on October 12, 2022, in a attempt to cross the English Channel
Migrants try to start an outboard engine after boarding a smuggler's boat on the beach of Gravelines, near Dunkirk, northern France on October 12, 2022, in a attempt to cross the English Channel - Sputnik International, 1920, 14.11.2022
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The number of illegal immigrants reaching the UK this year has already topped 40,000, on top of the 28,500 who arrived in 2021, despite a multi-million funding agreement with France to patrol its side of the English Channel.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has hailed a revised deal with France to control people trafficking across the English Channel.
The PM spoke to reporters én route to the G20 summit in Bali as Home Secretary Suella Braverman flew to Paris to sign the accord with with French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

"The absolute priority that British people have right now, as do I, is to grip illegal migration," Sunak said. "I made that commitment that I would grip it in the summer and I can tell you all I have spent more time working on that than anything else other than the autumn statement over the past couple of weeks."

The revised agreement will see the UK's annual payments to France to control illegal immigration increase by 15 per cent from €62.7 million (£54.8 million) to €72 million (£63 million).
In return, France will increase the number of police officers patrolling the English Channel coast by 40 per cent, from 200 to about 280, as well as equipping them with surveillance drones and night vision optics.
France will also invest in more security, including CCTV, other surveillance technology and foot patrols with dogs, at the seaport and Channel Tunnel terminal at Calais to prevent illegal immigrants stowing away in lorries.
Cooperation with neighbouring countries on channel and North Sea coasts will reportedly be improved and a joint Anglo-French analysis team will be set up to share data.
Reception and removal centres will be set up in France for those who have been prevented from entering the UK in a bid to stop them falling onto the hands of people-trafficking gangs, and a special taskforce will be formed specifically to focus on Albanian migrants — who reportedly make up more than half of the 40,000 arrivals this year — and criminal gangs.
"We need to significantly reduce the numbers of people crossing the channel," Braverman told British media on Monday morning. "Illegal migration, particularly in the numbers that we've been seeing more recently, is totally unacceptable."
The home secretary said a "multi-dimensional approach" was needed and there was "no single answer, there's no quick fix, there's no silver bullet."
The number of people making the perilous crossing of the notoriously treacherous straits between Britain and the continent has risen steadily in recent years, with squatter camps along coasts of northern France and Belgium — aided by British charities — providing a staging ground.
People trafficked from France in small boats and were picked up in the English Channel are brought to the port of Dover - Sputnik International, 1920, 01.11.2022
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Crowded UK Migrant Center Plagued With 'Violence & Infections' Amid 'Breach of Humane Conditions'
The British coastguard and RNLI lifeboat service work constantly to rescue migrants from overloaded small boats after they cross the mid-way point in the channel into UK waters. Many are housed in hotels while their claims for political asylum are processed, as reception centres have become hopelessly overcrowded.
In 2019, a group of 39 Vietnamese immigrants died of suffocation and heat exhaustion while being smuggled into the UK in a goods lorry. Seven British and Romanian men were jailed on manslaughter or people-trafficking charges over their deaths.
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