I wouldn't call being concerned about net migration of 750k/year is "a huge fear of immigrants".
I note also that France is happy to let them cross the channel in rubber boats, with no effort to stop them.
I note also that France is happy to let them cross the channel in rubber boats, with no effort to stop them.
The truth is that France did have less incentive to prevent crossings as there was no longer any financial aid for them doing so. To be clear: the UK would definitely not act differently in that situation; though it's reprehensible.
It's also true that France no longer has infrastructure to cope with it's own migration and tougher laws being introduced in French are pushing migrants to tackle the treacherous journey.
However since the deal has been reached France is doing as much as it can to prevent crossings -- that said, it betrays the real problem.
The number of "small boats" making crossings ("Small Boats" being a parroted line) was 29,090 for the year of 2023 (as of December). Which is a reduction from the year prior due to our agreement with France. But that's nothing compared to the net migration figures of 750,000 (largest on record and by a huge margin) and that also precludes the fact that of those migrants crossing on small boats may not be granted asylum (5,284 as of September '23 - 18%) were denied and sent away.
Not exactly an embarrassingly large number in the grand scheme of things, which makes it a bit of a boogeyman.
Even generous estimates put the number at 13,000 and we have laws and social systems to break this behaviour.
There's more victims of fraud in the UK, (21% of people have lost >£1,000 to fraud); which puts the number at 14,224,728 affected citizens.
Granted, human trafficking is a significantly worse problem, but it's not endemic.
Numbers are down, but I'd be interested to see what that is attributed to, once weather effects etc are taken into account.
You also say 5,284 people were "denied and sent away". Were they actually physically deported from the UK?
And I agree, Net Migration is out of control and needs to come down severely.
Your first claim is that it was RNLI (which is a charity btw) taxiing migrants, which has some decent counterfactual evidence citing first-party sources: https://theferret.scot/claim-nigel-farage-about-rnli-taxi-se...
The second claim is that it's the french escorting people across the channel, there was only one incident that invoked this which was the french navy chasing a small boat into english waters under low visibility, the ire was caught because the french naval vessel requested that a British ferry make way for the naval vessel which cleared a path for the dinghy full of migrants. - as usual, a sprinkle of truth and Farage will parrot it on GB news and the murdoch media will fan the flames as much as possible.
Hate peddlers the lot of them, and all in an attempt to make you scared, scared and fearful so you vote on emotion and not on information. And it's working.
You can literally go to ship tracking websites and see the RNLI boats travel into the channel, and see photographic evidence (despite the efforts of channel ports to block this) of the people (the vast majority of whom are young men from safe countries) being unloaded and put on coaches to accommodation.
You can also see the French warships making no effort to stop the boats and making sure they safely leave French waters.
Please stop gaslighting.
The ferret doesn’t have to be reputable since it’s referencing first party data sources directly and linking to them, something The Evening Standard and The Sun fail to do often. And certainly something Farage has never done.
So, you could not possibly be more wrong when disregarding it.
Stop the gaslighting.
e.g. there were 488k work visas and 632k study visas granted in 2022: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...