Why is there a major crackdown on migrants happening in the UK?

On March 7th, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government announced new legislation that would crack down on migration to Britain from small boat crossings via the English Channel. 

"We have tried it every other way, and it hasn't worked," Sunak said during a press conference in Dover after Suella Braverman introduced the new migration bill in the House of Commons.  

"This will always be a compassionate and generous country,” Sunak said, “but the current situation is neither moral nor sustainable, it cannot go on.”

Migrants began entering the UK via small boat crossings shortly after Covid-19 restrictions prevented air, rail, and ship access according to The Associated Press. 

“For decades,” wrote Jill Lawless of The Associated Press, “thousands of migrants have traveled to northern France each year in hopes of reaching the U.K.”

“Many are drawn by family ties, the English language, or the belief it’s easy to find work in the U.K.,” Lawless noted, adding that the situation has only gotten increasingly worse. 

In 2018, only a few hundred migrants used small boats to cross the English Channel and enter the United Kingdom illegally. But the numbers have increased quickly. 

By 2020 the number of migrants entering Britain via the Channel had risen to 8500, a number which had more than tripled, and by 2022 it reached 45,000. 

“Groups of migrants arrive almost daily on beaches or in lifeboats along England’s southern coast, sending the asylum issue up the news and political agenda,” Lawless wrote. 

PM Boris Johnson’s government attempted to address the growing migrant problem in April 2022, reaching a deal to send asylum seekers entering Britain by boat on a one-way trip to Rwanda where they would stay if their claim was successful. 

“The British government says the plan will discourage people from making dangerous attempts to cross the English Channel, and put people-smuggling gangs out of business,” Jill Lawless wrote in an article for The Associated Press at the time. 

Johnson’s plan failed, however, and migrants have continued to cross the English Channel in droves, something Sunak hoped to change with his new legislation. 

If passed, The Illegal Migration Bill will see any illegal migrants crossing into Britain via unauthorized routes “detained and then promptly removed, either to their home or a safe third country,” according to a statement on the Home Office’s website. 

"We will detain those who come here illegally and then remove them in weeks, either to their own country if it is safe to do so or to a safe third country like Rwanda," Sunak said in his address at Dover, adding "we have tried it every other way, and it hasn't worked."

The object of the new legislation, according to the Home Office, is to put a stop to illegal migration by boat and to remove anyone with no legal right to be in the United Kingdom. 

"In the last two years the numbers of people crossing the Channel illegally has more than quadrupled,” Sunak said. “That is the scale of what is happening.”

A Labour Party amendment aiming to block Sunak’s migration bill was defeated by a vote of 249 to 312 on March 13th, it will now move onto its second reading according to The Guardian.