The UK’s roaring people smuggler crisis roars on, with the number of illegal migrants detected coming by boat to the southern coast pushing past another milestone to 25,000 in 2025 so far.
13 so-called small boats carrying 898 migrants — one of the busiest days of 2025 to date — were brought ashore on Wednesday 30th, government figures say, pushing the total number of arrivals for 2025 to 25,436.
The pace of arrivals is the briskest of any Channel migrant crisis year yet and puts 2025 on track to have the highest number of boat migrants of any year by a considerable margin. On present trends, the annual total could be pushing 60,000 by Christmas.
2022 is the previous record-breaking year and didn’t hit 25,000 arrivals until late August. Last year, it reached 25,000 in late September.
The now year-old UK Labour government has made repeated promises on controlling the border crisis, and the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was quick to insist he’s actually succeeding when contradicted on this point in front of President Donald Trump during his Scotland trip last week. Meanwhile, the country’s borders remain functionally open with no meaningful deportation programme underway.
As reported by Breitbart London at the time of the past milestone being reached at 20,000, it is the United Kingdom being a soft touch on migration that acts as such a powerful pull-force drawing migrants to the island, whatever the superficially tough rhetoric of the government may say otherwise. It was stated:
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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