Britain’s borders are at the frontiers of the EU

Still largely unnoticed in the general debate, illegal migration to Britain, notably in the form of small boats crossing the Channel to come from France to the UK, has fallen substantially in recent months. The number of people arriving this way fell by 45% between the start of this year and 23 July (FT). The figures also show a 20% drop if you compare to arrivals in 2024. This is especially unusual given the warmer, calmer weather, which normally encourages illegal boat crossings.

While UK politicians will be eager to take credit for this shift, it is unlikely that most of the policies that Westminster has tried to put in place will really have been the cause. Although new UK measures are intended to be a deterrent, it is not obvious that the migrants who still arrive at the northern French coast are changing their minds. What seems more impactful is a lower number of migrants making it so far across Europe in the first place. And the main reason for that is simply that illegal crossings into the EU from neighbouring regions in the Middle East and North Africa have dropped significantly.

Frontex, the EU border agency, estimates that irregular border crossings fell by 40% overall this year, with the numbers coming via the central Mediterranean falling by almost half. We shouldn’t take it as a coincidence that the drop in migrants crossing into the EU from the south is so similar to the fall in numbers exiting towards the UK on the other side. If Channel crossings have fallen so substantially during the first months of this year, it is likely because there are fewer illegal migrants around to make the journey across the Channel in the first place.

None of this is to judge on the moral worth of what is happening. Some of the policies being used to achieve these reductions in illegal migration are far from humane: handing large sums over to authoritarian regimes to inflict violence on migrants that want to pass through on the way to Europe, dubious and politically motivated assessments of whether foreign countries are ‘safe’, the creation of processing or deportation ‘hubs’ in faraway countries where European politicians, publics and media will not need to think about what is being done in our name. None of this is automatically good by dint of being effective or purely because it is being driven through European cooperation and integration.

Yet we can and should distinguish between the ‘what’ of a policy and the ‘how’. There are many different positions held by a great variety of people across the continent on the best ways to manage illegal migration, but what we see today is that the success of any of them runs through European action rather than national border theatrics.

This holds true even for those in Britain who might imagine that we can have a more progressive approach outside of the EU. Just as the fundamental determinant of the current drop in migration was not the UK acting alone, so the opposite would hold true as well. The UK could comfort itself with the idea of a kind and welcoming migration policy, but it would mean little when many migrants have to get through the EU’s barriers first to ever be able to reach our shores. With our real borders de facto at the edges of the EU, Britain’s real migration policy must also be judged there. To ignore this and only look at our own lawbooks would be to lie to ourselves.

No matter which way you approach it or what outcome you would prefer, the reality is that the best way for any European nation to determine its migration policy, save perhaps for those at the furthest eastern and southern edges, is to do so at the European level. Not because this is a political preference, but because this is the logical conclusion that geography pushes us towards. Whether in or out of the EU, or even the Schengen zone, we remain part of a single continent. Once again, the logic of European integration is not that our fates should be bound together, but that they already are and that our best response to this is to recognise our position and form our policies through institutions that match it.

Britain has been wracked by the question of migration control for over a decade. We have wasted a lot of time and done ourselves a great deal of harm indulging the falsehood that we could pull up the drawbridge and, like the king turning back the sea, exert a solely national control over the natural migration flows that have long criss-crossed the continent. Whether we like it or not, our borders do not start at Dover, or even at Calais, but in Calabria and Crete. We do not control whether Britain’s borders are European, for they surely are, but only whether we play a part in forming this European policy, or sit aside and see what others decide our migration policy should be. Only when Britain’s leaders understand this, and embrace Europe as the solution rather than the problem, will we regain some measure of control over our fate.