Illegal migrant crossings of the English Channel are occurring at a record pace since the start of the year, despite the left-wing Labour government’s pledge to end the crisis.
In less than three months, over 5,000 illegal aliens have been recorded reaching British shores after crossing the Channel in small boats launched from the beaches of France.
According to an analysis from the BBC, the number of crossings since the start of the year is an all-time high for the time period since the government began tracking such numbers almost a decade ago.
It came as 241 aliens were brought ashore on Saturday, taking the total for the year to 5,512. In comparison, at the same time last year, 4,306 had illegally crossed the waterway. By March 22nd of 2023, 3,683 illegals had crossed the Channel, and in 2022, 3,836 reached Britain via the illegal migrant route.
The 28 per cent increase in illegal crossings over last year may cast further doubt on Prime Minsiter Sir Keir Starmer’s promise to end the crisis.
Rather than simply returning illegal boat migrants to France, Starmer’s government has instead ploughed £150 million into schemes to “smash the gangs” of people smuggling networks facilitating the passage of illegal migrants across the Channel.
A Home Office spokesman said: “The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay. We will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.”
In another apparent failure to fulfil commitments made to the public by the Labour government, a document released from the Treasury has found that 8,000 more alleged asylum seekers are living in hotels than when Prime Minister Starmer came into office, the Times of London reported.
Despite Starmer vowing during the campaign to “end asylum hotels, saving the taxpayer billions of pounds”, the Treasury document predicted that due to “global instability”, illegal migrants will continue to pour into the country, and therefore, the scheme of putting them up in hotels will continue for years.
At present, over 38,000 illegals are being housed at taxpayer expense in hotels across the country at an average cost of £145 per night, or £5.5 million per day.
This has been a major driver of the increased cost to the government for asylum seekers, with the average cost soaring per migrant from £17,000 to £41,000 since 2020.
In addition to the hotel migrants, around 65,700 migrants are also being put up in what are called “dispersal accommodations,” such as houses or apartments across the country, at a cost of around £14 per person per night, or around £920,000 in total every day.
In a tacit admission of a critique long levied by sceptics of mass migration—that vast areas of the countryside will need to be paved over to make room for migrants—the Treasury document surmised that the leftist government’s plans to build 1.5 million new homes in England by 2029 may help alleviate the need to use hotels to house asylum seekers.
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