‘Boat migrant’ arrivals continue to land on the southern shores of Britain in record numbers, the total for the year having surpassed 20,000 in the early hours of this morning.
The number of people who crossed the English Channel to Britain’s porous southern border by small boat so far in 2025 reached 19,983 on Monday, an accounting of government figures prepared by broadcaster GB News, said. The count of migrants irregularly crossing the southern border — what were once called illegal migrants until that term was deprecated by the state and media in recent years — crossed the 20,000 line int he early hours of Tuesday morning as yet another boat landed in Kent with 60 migrants around 0200.
And the number of arrivals will doubtless continue to soar today and in the coming days. The summer weather and low sea state encourages smugglers and half a dozen more migrant boats were detected as heading to Britain on Tuesday morning alone.
In all, the number of people who have come to the United Kingdom by small boat is 50 per cent higher today than it was by the same point of the year in 2024. In 2024, the 20,000 threshold was not passed until August 29th.
The busiest completed year for boat migrants to date was 2022, when a resumption of international travel after the Covid lockdowns saw a surge in migrant arrivals representing pent up demand. Even so, that bumper year is being handily left behind by 2025, which is considerably above the 2022 arrival rate and exempting some unforeseen event closing the border completely, will become a record-setter by year’s end.
Any hope of the government getting a grip on the small boats crisis seems remote, however. This week marks the first anniversary of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer coming to power after the 2024 General Election, an election in which he promised to “smash” the people smuggling gangs that operate the deadly cross-Channel trade in humans. A recent report by the BBC notes boat migrants are “undeterred” by the Prime Minister.
As for why the number of arrivals might be soaring, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage stated the pull factors including newly arrived migrants being handed “everything” by the state. He said: “This morning marked 20,000 people who have crossed the English Channel in small boats this year. It is a record and will only increase if we continue to give them everything when they arrive.”
Indeed, as noted by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, almost everyone who comes to the United Kingdom by smuggler boat subsequently remains in the country, with staggeringly few. Some 68 per cent have asylum applications granted and as of 2024 only three per cent had ever been returned home.
The soft landing boat migrants enjoy once they reach the United Kingdom has also become a matter of controversy with the public, who ultimately pay for it. The bill for migrant hotels, for instance, has already cost billions of pounds. Seeking to duck bad news cycles from the cost and social impacts of such plantations of migrants in local communities, the government is now seeking to buy up long-term leases on private homes to disperse the guests more widely.
Critics have already noted the impact of pushing up rents by artificially constraining the supply of homes for rent further exacerbates community tensions, however, with recent rioting in Ballymena cited.
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