DOVER, England — Kent is England’s first line of defense against the world that begins at the white cliffs of Dover and, getting ever more foreign after France, continues to the far end of Asia. The English Channel is little more than 20 miles wide as it hooks around the bottom right corner of England, and on a clear, late summer morning like this, you can see Calais and the dunes of the French coast. The Romans and the Normans invaded from there. Napoleon and Hitler would have done the same if they could have.\
Dover sits below its cliffs, a tatty mix of tourist attraction and working port. Its backstreets feel faded. Like Calais across the water, Dover is economically depressed and politically radical. Unlike most of southern England, this is Brexit country. When the Victorian moralist Matthew Arnold came here on his honeymoon in 1851, he heard in the scrape of the retreating tide on its pebbled beach the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the age of faith and the end of the world. Today, the world and all its faiths and feuds are coming north and west.
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An incoming tide of illegal immigration is washing across the other southern border, Europe’s Mediterranean frontier. Some of the incomers are refugees. In 2015, it was the great wave of fugitives from the Syrian civil war. Last year, it was Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion. But most are economic migrants. Risking their lives and their families’ savings, they hope to exchange failed states and foreshortened futures for the comfort and opportunities of Europe.
This is the visible aspect of the global business in human trafficking. A web of illegal routes converges on the Mediterranean from Africa and Asia, with an international network of criminal gangs managing each leg of the journey like travel agents. Mass drownings in the Mediterranean are now as much a part of the European summer as two weeks by the pool in Spain or Italy. On social media, you see surreal seaside encounters between some of the world’s richest and poorest people: the Europeans waving their arms in their swimwear as the Africans clamber from a beached dinghy.
Now and then, something so atrocious happens that everyone pays attention for a few days. Usually, it is a mass drowning. In June, as many as 700 men, women, and children, mostly from Syria, Pakistan, and Egypt, drowned when an overloaded fishing trawler sank off southern Greece on its way from Turkey to Italy. The BBC claimed that the boat had wallowed in international waters for seven hours while Greek coast guards did nothing. The Greek coast guards insisted the boat had kept moving and that the smugglers, who had subdued their passengers by denying them food and water, had not put out a distress signal.
In September, the tiny southern Italian island of Lampedusa (population 6,462) received 15,000 migrants in just one week. Five thousand came on Sept. 12 alone. At one point, 60 boats were waiting in the port for their turn to dump their human cargo. Lampedusa’s detention center is designed for 400 people. The rest broiled on the dock, surrounded by riot police and cooled by water cannon. Some of the migrants broke out, fought the police, and set up a roadblock. It was not clear who controlled the island — and quite obvious that the European Union had lost control of its borders.
In 2013, when 368 North Africans drowned off Lampedusa, the EU’s president, Josep Borrell, uttered the hollowest words in the European vocabulary: “Never again.” Another 28,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean in the decade since Borrell drew his line in the sand.
If you survive the overland journey from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, or Syria and if you survive the sea crossing to Europe, you can go almost anywhere you want within the 27-nation EU. Almost. Amid the Syrian crisis of 2015, Hungary built a border wall between it and Croatia, an EU state, and Serbia, whose accession is pending. The theoretically borderless EU now permits member states to impose “temporary national security checks.” The frontiers of Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden are all currently policed.
England is the end of the line. If you can get into France, you can get across France. If you can get to Calais, you can get across the Channel to England. Every year since 2018, hundreds of “small boat” crossings have left the permanent migrant shanty town at Sangatte, near Calais, for the shores of Kent. The death toll on England’s southern border is a miniature version of the greater tragedy in the Mediterranean. In November 2021, 27 people drowned in the Channel, the worst loss of life in three decades. This year, an inquiry found that in the days before that disaster, British coast guards had “effectively ignored” 19 small boats in distress, leaving at least 440 people to drift in the Channel.
In August, a slow month for news, the British media were outraged when six people drowned when their vessel capsized off the English coast. The same media were even more outraged that month when the number of successful crossings for 2023 reached 100,000. After the 2021 drownings, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to stop the traffic and failed. His successor, Rishi Sunak, has also promised to stop it but has yet to detail how.
“Take back control,” the slogan that swung the Brexit referendum of 2016, meant all things to all kinds of voters. Directly or indirectly, regaining control over borders and immigration was a big motive for leaving the EU. As they did before the 2016 referendum to Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party, the Conservatives are now losing support to their right, to UKIP’s successor, Reform. The next elections, to be held by January 2025, may turn on who wins the battle of the boats.
The Dover Priory Hotel is hosting an all-day punk party to mark a regular’s 70th birthday. The sounds of Sham 69, the late-1970s football hooligan’s favorite, spill into the street along with a crowd of drinkers, mostly white men of a certain age with cropped hair, tattoos, and flattened noses. It is midafternoon, so the atmosphere is still amiable, but King Sark crosses the road to avoid them.
King Sark is the name he gives me, anyway. I promise I am not a police officer, so he agrees to talk. He is from Ghana. “I am a research chemist for a company in Ashford,” he says with sudden fluency, shooting a quick sideways look. “I have a six-month visa.”
I don’t have the heart to ask him why a research chemist is padding around the back streets of Dover in flip-flops and a torn T-shirt or what the name of his company is. “The people in Dover are very kind,” he adds plaintively as we shake hands. I wish him luck and set off into town in search of restless natives. It doesn’t take long.
Roger, Dover “born and bred” and retired after 50 years as a seaman, is sitting on a bench in the High Street with his wife, Maureen. They are not feeling kind.
“They’re using the lifeboats as a ferry,” he says. “They’re coming over here by the boatloads. Now, that’s what we don’t like. We’ve worked all our lives for what we’ve got, and my parents and grandparents have done this for us. And they’re coming straight in, and they’ve done nothing, right?”
“They’re getting everything in hotels and food, the whole lot,” Maureen says. She used to work handling illegal immigrants at the ferry port, and now her daughter is handing out tracksuits and sneakers to the arrivals. “My daughter’s doing three jobs to pay her rent and her food. They come here — it really annoys me. They get everything when they step off. They get halfway out, beyond the French zone, then they’re escorted here.”
This is exactly what happens. The gangs on the French side, many of them Albanian, send off the migrants, sometimes on inflatables that look like they were made for fun at the beach. The French coast guards escort them halfway. The British coast guards pick them up and bring them to Dover. Discarded dinghies and inflatables are piled on a beach at the port.
Folkestone is a few miles south of Dover and much less gritty. Once an upmarket Victorian resort, Folkestone is reviving as an artsy, affordable alternative to London. In Dover, the Conservatives run the local council. In Folkestone, the Conservatives were recently overthrown by Labour and the Greens. On a late summer day, the French coast shimmers across an improbably blue sea, and the scent of pines and palms suggests the south of France. Sometimes the migrants make it all the way here without being detected and wash up on the beach. It’s not like the United States’s southern border, where endless human chains slog through the brush. In Folkestone, they run across the sand in small groups, seeking cover like D-Day reenactors.
Amber Anderson, an illustrator, and a friend are down for the day from Margate, another old resort town that is reinventing itself as an arts hub. “They’re welcome as far as I’m concerned,” Anderson says. “They’re not wanting to sponge off the system. Doesn’t everyone have the right to survive?” She mentions Manston, an old Royal Air Force base that has been repurposed as a holding camp. “People were locked in cages. Children were separated from their parents. It was completely illegal. They were overwhelmed and couldn’t process anyone.”
The British government reports that the average boat size increased from seven passengers in 2018 to 43 passengers in early 2023. In 2018, the boats arrived once every 10 days on average. By early 2023, it was four days in every 10. Eighty-seven percent of the arrivals are male. Overall, the largest cohort is Iranian, making up 21% of all small-boat arrivals, but the countries of origin fluctuate. Iranians were 80% of 2018 arrivals and 66% of 2019 arrivals. In the summer of 2022, Albanians comprised 45% of arrivals, but Afghans led the late 2022 influx, with 33%. The first months of 2023 saw a sudden surge in Indians.
Britain’s asylum system has buckled under the pressure. By March 2023, small-boat applicants comprised half of the United Kingdom’s asylum petitions. Seventy-eight percent of small-boat applications since 2018 and 93% of applications in the year to March 2023 were still awaiting a decision. The government has parked the applicants in provincial hotels at the taxpayers’ expense, especially in seaside towns.
Around 16% of small-boat arrivals are “unaccompanied minors” 17 years old or younger. In January 2023, Kent Online (“News you can trust”) reported 295 unaccompanied minors had disappeared from Kentish hotels in the previous year and that 71 had never been found. After a local agitator talked his way into one of the hotels and filmed its overcrowded interior, the government sent in the Gurkhas. These crack Nepalese troops, demobbed from the British army by budget cuts, now work for a private security firm that guards the unaccompanied minors.
“It’s a shame,” one of the Gurkhas admits, smiling but not taking off his reflective shades. He is standing on sentry duty in the doorway of the Carlton Hotel, a crumbling Victorian terrace with views over the water. He’s not there to stop people from getting in. This is not Germany, where the local racists firebomb migrant hostels. He’s there to stop the inmates from escaping. I ask how many young men are inside. He stops smiling. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
Next door in the White Cliffs apartments, Sheila invites me in for a cup of tea while her infant granddaughter plays on the rug. She has retired here from Canterbury, Kent’s cathedral city, and she doesn’t mind living next door to a migrant hostel. “We’ve got sympathy for these poor people,” she says. The economic difference between Dover and Folkestone isn’t that wide, but Dover is a working-class port on the way down and Folkestone is a middle-class enclave on the way up. Sheila blames the Conservatives for the asylum crisis. I get the impression she wouldn’t vote for them even if they do fix the small boats.
The British government would be within its legal rights if it dumped the migrants back on French beaches and EU territory, but it needs the French government’s goodwill in the endless negotiations over post-Brexit trade terms. The Conservatives then tried a cunning wheeze, deporting migrants to Rwanda. Apart from being a moral insult to all parties, the Rwandans included, there were legal objections. It turned out that despite Brexit, Britain is still bound by the European Court of Human Rights. Now the Conservatives are mumbling about leaving the court. Meanwhile, the migrants stay in Britain. This encourages more migrants, and that enriches the criminal gangs. It also enrages reasonable Britons such as Roger and Maureen, and that enrages other reasonable Britons such as Sheila.
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Canterbury is midway on the old road from Dover to London. Young African men wander through its medieval lanes or whiz past on bikes in the livery of Deliveroo. Police now guard the approaches to the cathedral where Thomas à Becket was murdered and its school, which might be the world’s oldest. An officer advises young women not to go to McDonald's and to avoid the housing estate by the river where the migrants have gathered. In May, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called a government bill to deport migrants “morally wrong.” But Welby lives in a Tudor palace in London and is little more than a Guardian columnist in a cassock.
Kent is the "Garden of England." On a warm Sunday afternoon, the slow train to London winds through hop fields and orchards. When the doors open at little village stations with bucolic names such as Shepherds Well and Bekesbourne, you hear birdsong. At one stop, four men huddle over their cellphones on the platform. Each wears an identical plastic jacket and black backpack, as if they’re on a school trip. The jacket and phone are part of their package deal with the smugglers. The gangs at Calais give them the backpacks so that they will travel as light as possible on the inflatables. They could be Uzbeks or Uyghurs. They look tired, dirty, lost, and scared. They sidle onto the train and study their sneakers. We know and they know, but no one says anything.
An hour later, the train pulls into St. Pancras. This is the terminal for the Paris express, which these men might have taken, had they come legally. The concourse is packed with families, and the coffee shops are busy. The four men weave slowly through the crowd, then disappear into the London Underground.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.