Migrants Die at Sea Because Governments Let Them Drown
Over the last two weeks, six migrants died trying to cross the English Channel. An aid worker at the French port of Calais writes on the political choices that condemn them to early graves — and the need for safe routes for people on the move.
Migrants line up outside an aid station near the "Jungle" migrant camp in Calais, France, on October 27, 2016. (Philippe Huguen / AFP via Getty Images)
When someone drowns, we gather in the Parc de Richelieu. We arrange ourselves in a circle. Somebody might bring a microphone and speaker. Behind us, statues of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle stare into the void before a row of metal arches shaped like the borders of France. We try to give words to our anger because, properly speaking, we cannot grieve. You cannot grieve a human being without a face or name. You cannot mourn the drowning of someone whose decades of life, achievements and failures, joys and follies, are hidden from you. There is only a void at the center of our circle.
This ritual has become all too common in Calais. In just the past two weeks, six people have drowned in the narrow stretch of water separating England from continental Europe. One incident on July 12 killed four people from one boat. A rubberized dinghy, vastly overloaded and already launched at an obscene distance from the English coast, began to deflate off the shore of Boulogne-sur-Mer. By the time the French coast guard reached the boat four of its passengers had drowned, their bodies retrieved from the sea by helicopter. Their names are not released by the maritime prefect — we know only that they were men, citizens of Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. The drownings of two more unidentified migrants last Thursday and Friday put the death toll at the French-British border at twenty-one so far this year.
That is too many times to gather in the Parc de Richelieu. Too many times to wonder whether our makeshift memorials will be echoed by proper funerals in absentia far away in Tigray and Darfur, by those who know the names and histories of the drowned. It is unlikely that their bodies will ever be repatriated to their families. They will rest in French soil, permitted a small corner of Europe only in death.
I write as a humanitarian worker who has spent much of this summer volunteering at the French-British border. This puts me at the furthest point from impartial. It means I or my colleagues may have known the men and women lost to the border as they prepared to cross from the camps and warehouse squats around Calais or Grande-Synthe. The era when Calais’s asylum seekers were concentrated into a single huge camp — the so-called Jungle, the name derived from dzhanghal, the Pashto word for “forest” — is long past. The Jungle’s demolition in 2016 ensured that any refugee encampments would remain small and scattered — tents and tarps and makeshift firepits cached away into copses of trees, empty lots, and abandoned warehouses. None of this infrastructure is sanctioned by the French state, whose official policy is to prohibit migrants from building even temporary shelters. The provision of basic sanitation facilities, food and water, and safety and legal information falls almost entirely to us volunteers. It is across this fractured landscape that we encounter the men and women who wager their lives on the boats.
To be a humanitarian worker in Calais means existing in a liminal space between experience and the unknowable. I have known refugees, but will never experience the forces that drive them over the border. I have answered distress calls from sinking boats, but I have never been on the water amid the darkness and screams. We never know exactly who we are grieving when we cast our anger and despair into that shadowy void shaped like a person, a migrant, a refugee. But if our grief is diffuse, lacking a subject around which to coalesce, we know exactly where to direct our anger.
These drownings are not tragic accidents to be meekly mourned. They are the direct and predictable results of state policy. To put it very simply, the governments of the United Kingdom and France have constructed a border regime that virtually guarantees that asylum seekers will drown, and that these drownings will increase. The militarization of the frontier, coupled with cruel and farcical policies designed to render migration costly and precarious, is the direct cause of last week’s deaths.
Apparatus of Harassment
To work in border spaces is to understand that policies do not exist in the ether. People die off the coast of Calais because when a migrant arrives at this little seaside town, she arrives in a place designed to make her access to the basic conditions of life as precarious as possible. Migrants are not viewed as bearing any legitimate legal claims; having violated the European Union’s immigration laws, they are subordinated to military logics of security and control. This means raids, arrests, detention centers, thermal cameras, tear gas, and deportations, rubber bullets and dogs and armored vans. This is the apparatus of the border, as weighty and real as the thirty miles of barbed wire that bristles across Calais.
These policies are designed to deter in the crudest sense. They are the national equivalent of nailing “TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT” to the farm gate. Yet very evidently, their deterrence value is negligible. This has already shaped up to be the busiest year on record for irregular crossings of the English Channel. Already, 2024 has seen more than 15,500 successful arrivals on British soil, up 13 percent from 2023. The numbers bear out a simple fact: fortifying the coasts of Calais against boat launches does not actually decrease the number of crossings. It simply makes them more dangerous.
That the drownings on July 12 took place off the coast of Boulogne-sur-Mer — just over twenty miles southwest of Calais — is no accident. As police patrols intensify across the beaches closest to Calais itself, inflatable boats are pushed to cross further and further down the coast where police presence is more lax. Further launching points means more time at sea, higher risks of encountering adverse weather conditions, and — as last week’s drownings attest — a greater chance of overloaded dinghies deflating and filling with water. Where the crossing from Calais to Dover takes roughly four hours in a small boat, the humanitarian community in Calais has watched with horror as we encounter migrants now risking ten to fifteen hours on the sea in flimsy dinghies. Crossings launched as far away as Baie de Somme, almost seventy miles south of Calais, are now a reality.
It is hardly safe to cross the Channel by raft in even balmy weather, but it is atrociously dangerous to attempt passage when winds are stronger than ten knots, or when waves are higher than half a meter. The passeurs, or smugglers, however, have few scruples, and most asylum seekers have already wagered too much in cost and personal safety to forgo the chance to cross even under rough weather. Thus coastal surveillance predictably incentivizes crossings when weather conditions are so severe that the police themselves see no “safe” window to cross and are less likely to patrol the beaches. Having warned asylum seekers against crossing under winds of ten knots, I have seen boats launched under windspeeds of thirteen knots or higher. To repeat: the huge apparatus of surveillance and policing on the coast does not mean fewer crossings. It means longer crossings, in worse weather, with greater risk of death.
Strategies like these — the state resorting to punish what it cannot stop — define much of the French and British response to the ongoing “crisis” of irregular migration. On the ground, the horrors of the border take on an air of farce. Take the French policy of zero point de fixation — the system of raids, mass evictions, and restrictions on aid delivery by which the French state aims to make the migrant experience as tenuous and precarious as possible. In practice, this “anti-fixation” policy means that every camp, squat, and settlement in Calais is raided by the gendarmerie on a forty-eight-hour basis — arduous affairs that frequently turn violent. Very evidently, this “strategy of enforced misery” has not made the slightest dent on the continued existence of migrant encampments, which remain readily visible around Calais.
All the raids do achieve is human suffering and material waste, destroying tents and personal belongings, obliging refugees to endure exposure and unsafe conditions in encampments seldom more than hours away from being raided. For aid workers, our days become wearying exercises in déjà vu: give a tent to a family today, and they will be sleeping rough tomorrow. “If the aim is to discourage migrants from gathering in northern France,” concludes Human Rights Watch, “these policies are a manifest failure and result in serious harm.”
The Need for Safe Routes
These policies of militarization and punitive deterrence enjoy almost unanimous support across the ruling parties in both France and the United Kingdom. The return to office of Britain’s Labour Party might mean an end to some of their Tory predecessors’ more egregiously cruel and illegal schemes. The UK will soon stop housing migrants on an overcrowded barge, while former prime minister Rishi Sunak scrapped his plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing even before he lost July’s election. But there is little promise of transformational change. For new prime minister Keir Starmer, as for Sunak and Emmanuel Macron, migration is a problem of law and order.
Thus the reaction of the UK and French governments to news of drownings is typically to blame nebulous “smuggler gangs” as the prime cause of the border crisis. For shadow home secretary James Cleverly — newly removed from his six-month tenure in government — migrant deaths are the result of a “vile trade in human suffering,” as if tens of thousands of asylum seekers had been forcibly trafficked across the Channel and not obliged to pay extortionate fees to smugglers in order to exercise their right to claim asylum.
In framing dangerous migration as a problem of people-smuggling — and not one of truncated access to legal rights and conditions of life — European governments seek to justify militarizing their frontiers against some of the continent’s most desperate populations. This paradigm elides the actual dynamics of irregular migration to the United Kingdom. Smugglers facilitate migration but do not cause it. Aid workers know that those unable to pay for passage risk even more dangerous forms of transport. Already refugees try daily to enter England by climbing into the undercarriages of trucks, or by simply finding their own boats. The death of a nineteen-year-old Sudanese man in April, impaled by loose metal on a truck and the drownings of migrants who attempted the crossing in store-bought kayaks are but two recent proofs that ending smuggling will not end unnecessary deaths.
In any case, there’s little reason to believe that bringing the hammer down on diffuse networks of smugglers is at all feasible. Starmer’s plans to equip a brand-new security force with “anti-terror powers” smacks of bluster. “Even if you did smash the gangs,” states professor Anand Menon, “I am very skeptical it is going to lead to significant decrease in the numbers.” The dynamics of supply and demand are simply too compelling.
Rightly or wrongly, the UK is seen by most of the refugees I have met in France as one of the few tenable refuges from conflict and destitution. Since many migrants already speak English and have family in that country, they frequently have credible reasons to seek settlement in the UK specifically — even if they have already passed through ostensibly safe European countries. (It’s worth noting that there is no requirement in international law for refugees to claim asylum in the first “safe” nation in which they arrive.) More prosaically, the UK boasts a large economy, and its government begrudgingly offers more in the way of monetary and social support to asylum seekers than other European states, though at roughly £49.18 weekly allowance per person, this aid is scarcely lavish. So long as millions seek refuge from war and poverty, and so long as coyotes can charge thousands per head for passage on cheap inflatable boats, smuggling will exist on the French-British border.
Being a humanitarian worker means necessarily adopting a pragmatic orientation toward the crises to which we respond, at times maintaining a prudent distance from questions of policy. In delivering emergency aid to asylum seekers at the French-British border, it is not my remit to determine whether individuals present credible claims to asylum or “merely” seek economic betterment. We deal with needs as brute facts. People are already here on the border in their thousands, already subject to conditions that demand humane response: hunger, extortion, predation, and death.
Yet while the imperatives of public policy are necessarily different from those of emergency aid, the latter has a pragmatism to it that must surely inform policymaking in one key respect. European governments do not have the ability to end irregular migration at their borders. That goal would demand transformative change at the global level. But we can determine whether migrant populations are relegated to suffer and die on our doorstep. While militarization and harassment have wreaked significant harm on migrant populations, these strategies have very evidently not deterred people from seeking asylum in ever-greater numbers. These policies, already legally and morally odious, must be considered discredited even on their own terms.
The good news is that there is a simple, well-established solution. Safe routes across the Channel are feasible and desperately needed. Not only would safe passage ensure an end to the grotesque reality of drownings; they would also end migrants’ exploitation at the hands of passeurs. The British government had no hesitation in issuing nearly a quarter-million refugee visas to Ukrainians when their country was invaded by Russia in 2022, and over 150,000 Ukrainians duly arrived in the United Kingdom without any recourse to those dreaded smuggler gangs. (Since the war began, only one Ukrainian was ever reported to have crossed the Channel on a small boat.) From humanitarian corridors to refugee visas, the twentieth century is replete with examples of policies that countries implemented to allow populations fleeing war and persecution to attain safe routes to refuge.
Many advocacy organizations, including London-based Safe Passage International, have articulated a paradigm for safe passage that is workable and humane. With concerted public pressure, these policies may well enter the lexicon of Europe’s governments. Yet so long as force and denial define these powerful states’ response to the populations poised on their borders, the drownings can only continue.