The media make it sound like a scene from a horror movie. The nameless Calais migrants storm into the tunnel under cover of night, wielding chainsaws, metal and sticks.
This “threat” to the nation seems clear in the papers. (One even put migrants and Hitler in the same headline.) Send in armies, Gurkhas, even Jason Stratham, if necessary – whatever it takes to defend our land.
But do you have five minutes to read this, before you barricade the doors?
It’s time to get the story straight.
Cast your mind back to June – seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? French ferry workers went on strike over hundreds of lost jobs.
Those strikes then led to fires and blockades around the port of Calais – causing huge disruption. Anyone heading to France by train or ferry had a problem.
Even when events eased off a bit, there were still big delays and a backlog of traffic. After all, this route isn’t just popular for booze cruises – it’s how we transport most of our goods across the channel.
Soon Kent had to enforce Operation Stack, an emergency measure that parks thousands of lorries along the M20, and diverts other traffic on to smaller roads. In the last two months, it’s been used dozens of times.
For migrants living around Calais, the truck traffic jams and distracted police have been a chance to scramble on lorries and trains to reach the UK.
Sure, this adds to the travel chaos – but it’s not the sole cause.
Nor is the situation a new one. Migrants have been arriving in Calais for years: willing to risk razor wire, truncheons and high-speed rail lines in the slog to something better.
Why do they take these risks?
We can’t speak for everyone in Calais.
But our experience shows us that the vast majority are asylum seekers, fleeing persecution and war zones. Many have come from Syria, where the terrible conflict, killing hundreds of thousands, has rumbled on for four long years: longer, in fact, than the First World War.
Even if someone hopes to improve their lot, rather than claim asylum, they must have left behind something awful to take this journey and end up here. In Calais, they live and sleep in a makeshift camp, always dreaming of a lucky break. To get to this point, your life options must be few and desperate.
Either way, we shouldn’t call anyone in Calais:
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the catch-all ‘illegal immigrant’ – a term that associated press guidance calls “inaccurate and dehumanising”
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a less-than-human “flood” or “swarm”, like a plague of locusts on the land – instead of brothers, sisters and mothers
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a violent criminal, as implied by words such as “thuggish”, “marauding” and “chainsaw-wielding”.
Alex Fraser, our head of refugee services, was in Calais just a few months ago. He said: “I met dignified people who were struggling to cope with a terrible situation: stuck in Calais because they were trying to find a place of safety.”
Desperate, yes. A threat to the nation? No.
Why are they desperate to get here? France has everything they need.
Yes, but the people stuck in Calais have more compelling reasons to continue their journeys. They are struggling to get on with their lives.
Some have family members in the UK, who they long to see and live with again. For others, it can boil down to the fact they speak English. If you were forced to flee, wouldn’t you head somewhere people speak the same language, as you look for a job and try to make friends?
Whatever the reasons, people are risking their lives to get here. At least ten have died in the tunnel since June – including a young Sudanese man the other week, who was crushed by a truck.
All very sad - but a genuine refugee would claim asylum earlier
Lots of people have heard about some guidance that states people should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. It’s a European Union (EU) regulation called Dublin.
Countries in the EU tend to interpret the Dublin Regulation differently. Most view it as meaning whichever country first takes someone’s fingerprints.
For many reasons, this doesn’t always happen straightaway. For instance, some people may be smuggled in the back of a lorry and driven across borders – so there’s no chance to register at an earlier point. Some countries in Europe are simply not able to fingerprint everybody, making it difficult to prove where people have travelled through.
For others, they have a particular destination in mind, so they’ll keep moving onwards. For a very small number, this might be to the UK.
But we can't take them all!
Nobody’s asking us to.
Let’s look at the bigger picture.
Calais is a tiny part of a world that now has 21.3 million refugees and asylum seekers – nearly 60 million if you count those adrift inside their country’s own borders.
For 3,000 people, those desperate journeys have led them to Calais. From there, they hope to get to the UK and find the final stop: home.
But 86% of the world’s refugees aren’t in Calais. Or the UK. Or even this continent. They’re in a developing country, next door to their own.
In Lebanon, one in every five people is now a Syrian refugee. In the UK, refugees and asylum seekers make up just 0.24% of the population.
We're still taking more than our share in Europe
The number of asylum applications in Europe has increased by 44% over the last year – but the UK ranks 16th out of 28 EU countries for the number of asylum seekers per head.
Asylum seekers are over five times more likely to head to Germany than the UK. In fact, around one in every three people has lodged their claim there.
Asylum seekers are also more likely to end up in Sweden, Italy, France and Hungary.
In short, more people are claiming asylum in France. Many are claiming asylum in Italy or Hungary: the first safe countries they reach after being swept into the EU by smugglers and rickety boats.
So how will things get back to normal?
It’s likely that striking ferry workers and the French government will come to an agreement at some point – although not for a while yet.
But this doesn’t stop the fact that the migrants will still be there in Calais: seen but unreported, hanging on to the hope of something better.
The answer is not to make their journeys and conditions more difficult. This won’t stop people ending up in Calais, but simply add to the suffering.
Europe needs to work together to respond to these numbers of people, while figures are on the rise from world events.
This might mean issuing more humanitarian visas, which grant permission into a country in advance. We could increase the number of resettlement places from war zones like Syria; a UNHCR scheme that finds safe countries for those with pressing needs. There are also ways toimprove the family reunion process for those who want to join loved ones.
All these things might stop people taking dangerous – and often deadly – treks to safety.
The fact that they’re willing to do so is the true stuff of nightmares.