At 11am yesterday, the Border Force vessel Ranger docked at the Kent port of Dover carrying 64 migrants. After departing from a Dunkirk beach, the migrants were rescued from their rubber boat mid-Channel by the French navy before being transferred to the British ship. This incident has become an almost daily occurrence as the influx of asylum seekers into the UK continues virtually unchecked.
One of the individuals who boarded the Ranger will go down in history as the 200,000th migrant to officially reach UK shores by small boat since records began in 2018. Using the Government's own figures, the Daily Mail calculated that the arrival of just 57 more migrants yesterday would take us to the controversial 200,000 mark. In the photograph above, the young man believed to be Migrant No. 200,000 is circled.
Profile of Migrant No. 200,000
He will likely hail from a Third World country, have a pitiful story of hardship to tell, and claim asylum because of it. His case is expected to take years to navigate the immigration system, and the likelihood of him ever leaving, either voluntarily or via deportation, is close to zero. By letting him in, along with the tens of thousands before him, Britain has committed a grotesque act of self-harm, according to the author.
Migrant No. 200,000 will have woken up this morning at the Manston processing centre in Kent, where all illegal boat arrivals are sent for up to 72 hours for an initial interview by Border Force officials. They will ask for his name, age, and nationality, but there is no guarantee he will answer truthfully. Over this weekend, he will leave Manston and be sent by coach to a Home Office hotel, where he will live for free – with a £49-a-month handout – for weeks, perhaps months, maybe years.
Escalation of the Crisis
This extraordinary scenario was unimaginable as little as ten years ago. While migrants were hiding in lorries on ferries from France as Britain became an easy target for mass illegal immigration at the turn of the century, things changed for the worse in 2016. Discarded rubber boats started appearing on the beaches of Kent and East Sussex. In 2017, the author began investigating what he suspected was a new illegal means of reaching the UK: small boats.
During 2018, 299 migrants arrived on traffickers' boats from Calais. The first pictures showed a group of men, wrapped in blankets, on Kent sand dunes, with the flimsy boat that had taken them 21 miles across the sea lying among the rocks in the shallows. It was hard not to feel sympathy for them. But soon, the trickle of individual boats morphed into a military-style operation run by ruthless people traffickers. Vessels made in China and shipped to European hideouts grew larger, now carrying 60 or 70 people instead of five or six as in 2018.
The Tory government turned a blind eye. The author's warnings published in the Daily Mail, that what had been an occasional boat run out of Calais by a few migrants had become a daily armada, were ignored. In late 2018, he even hired a rubber boat himself. With the help of a skipper, he travelled from Gravelines, northern France, to Dover without a passport to highlight the growing scandal and danger of open borders.
Political Inaction
Since Labour came to power in July 2024, more than 70,000 people have reached the south coast by small boat, and many more will follow Migrant No. 200,000 unless something is done to stop them – and fast. In late 2024, the author appeared in a two-part BBC documentary examining open borders. He was invited because he had met and interviewed 500 migrants as far afield as northern France, Turkey, and the Greek Islands as they plotted their way to Britain. Appearing with him were former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron, and a clutch of ex-Home Secretaries. They were all, to some degree, architects of the fatally flawed migration policy. Confronted about the perils of open borders by the BBC, they either avoided the question or gave a passive response. None apologised. The author alone told the truth: 'A country without borders is not really a country at all. It is just a piece of land containing anyone who wishes to come and live there.'
Impact on Society
If we take the boat migrants alone, the tally of 200,000 arrivals – a number that roughly equates to the population of Bournemouth or Norwich – is almost too fantastical to comprehend. It is not cruel to say enough is enough. The author has met genuine refugees, many of them distressed families with children, as they try to reach Britain. They are now among the victims of this free-for-all: elbowed aside by young, invariably male, economic migrants who can afford to pay traffickers to get priority access to boats in France and Belgium. Once here, they are often a source of social upheaval. Every day, desperate people in Britain send videos of street violence, predatory sexual behaviour against women and girls, and general yobbish behaviour by some of the tens of thousands of illegals, from alien cultures and religions, who have been allowed to enter the country.
The British public's position on uncontrolled borders has been stated clearly and repeatedly for two decades. There was no clearer display of this discontent than at the ballot box yesterday when Nigel Farage's anti-migration Reform UK party stormed to success in the local elections. Yet the British asylum system, which costs no less than £4.7 billion a year, continues to grow thanks to the clamorous support of opportunistic charities, greedy immigration lawyers, and Left-wing politicians.
Conclusion
Migrant No. 200,000 is, of course, not personally to blame. By Monday, he will be in a warm hotel room, expecting that soon he will get a house, free medical care, and a steady stream of benefits – everything the gangs in France promised to lure him to buy a £4,000 ticket to ride. He will also have ready his backstory of oppression and persecution, carefully choreographed with help from charity workers in France, to assist his asylum claim. If he is from deeply homophobic Uganda, he will pose as gay; if Iranian, he will say he is a Christian convert suffering under a ruthless Islamic regime; or if Eritrean, his story will be that the appalling military dictatorship meant he faced lifelong servitude in the army. Whatever his plight, there must come a time when we harden our hearts to save ourselves. The answer to him, and any other bogus boat migrants asking for asylum, has to be a steadfast 'No'.
