Britain and France Point Fingers as Migrant Crisis Becomes a Political One
By STEVEN ERLANGER and KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA

LONDON — More than 4,500 vehicles are stuck along one of Britain’s main highways, caught in the chaos over efforts by desperate migrants to make their way through the Channel Tunnel from the French port city of Calais, 31 miles away. Another 4,500 cars and trucks are stuck on the other side of the English Channel.

Food is rotting, drivers are exasperated and commerce is delayed. Would-be vacationers bound for the Continent are furious, and the British news media is on a rampage, with The Daily Mail wondering how migrants could invade Britain when Hitler could not and calling for the army to be deployed.

The British government is in crisis mode, with Prime Minister David Cameron returning from Asia on Friday to lead yet another meeting of the security cabinet.

Under pressure to show that the government is in control, Mr. Cameron emerged on Friday to promise more high-tech security fencing and sniffer dogs for the French and the use of Defense Ministry land in Kent to park some of the waiting trucks, to get them off the highway.

“We’re absolutely on it,” he said, but then conceded, “This is going to be a difficult issue right across the summer.”

The British are blaming the French, the French are blaming the British, and both are blaming the European Union for an incoherent policy toward the thousands of people, many of them fleeing political horrors at home, who are trying to find jobs and a better future for themselves and their families in Europe.

The migrant crisis in Calais is hardly new, going back more than 15 years, but numbers are increasing, tactics are shifting and the political heat is rising.

The migrants, most of them from Libya, Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan, are finding new strategies to exhaust the French police, cut through fencing, stow away on trucks and try to get to Britain through the Channel tunnel. In the nightly game of attack and run, chase and release, traffic through the tunnel has been badly disrupted, and at least nine migrants have died in their attempts since June.

Some estimates are that the mess is costing the British economy 250 million pounds, or about $390 million, a day, while local governments in southern England are struggling to cope with at least a doubling of illegal migrants, who must be housed and fed, especially those who are minors.

Paul Carter, leader of the County Council in Kent, the county that is home to the British entrance to the tunnel, said the number of migrants under 18 in his care has doubled to 605 in the last three months, leaving the county a multimillion-pound funding gap, and, he told the BBC, “rising day by day, week by week.”

That burden, as well as dealing with the increased security for tunnel traffic and huge delays on the main highway leading to and from the tunnel, was having a major impact that the central government in London has only begun to consider, he said.

Bernie Gibson, managing director of Compass Fostering, which finds foster homes for illegal minor migrants, mostly male and many with little English, said finding “foster carers nationally for Compass is challenging anyway, but imagine on top of that these children are very traumatized, they don’t speak English, and often they come from very different cultural experiences.”

In fact the numbers of migrants in Britain illegally are relatively small compared with other European countries, in part because Britain is so hard to enter. And more than 80 percent of them are people who have entered legally but overstayed their visas, said Franck Düvell of the Center on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University.

“The anxiety about irregular entry remains disproportionate,” he said.

Peter Sutherland, a former European Union commissioner and now the United Nations special representative for international migration, said that the British reaction is “grossly excessive in terms of Calais,” characterizing the calls to stop economic migrants “a xenophobic response to the issue of free movement.”

He said Britain receives far fewer asylum applications than some other European countries, around 25,000 last year compared with 175,000 in Germany. Sweden, France and Italy also received more asylum claims than Britain did. At the same time, a country like Turkey is coping relatively quietly with more than 1.7 million registered refugees from Syria, and Jordan is coping with more than 800,000 refugees, according to the United Nations.

By contrast in Calais, Mr. Sutherland said, there are “a relatively small number in the context of what other countries are having to do — who are in terrible conditions and have to be dealt with by France and/or Britain.”

The number of asylum applications increased 5 percent in the year ending in March, the Home Office said, but remained less than a third of the peak number in 2002.

Britain’s total illegal population is thought to be less than one million, but a Home Office spokeswoman said that last year alone border officials intercepted 39,000 attempts to cross the Channel illegally, and that the numbers have risen considerably in the last month.

According to the National Crime Agency, the number of illegal immigrants actually caught trying to enter Britain more than doubled last year, with a 300 percent rise in the numbers coming from North Africa, especially Libya, through Italy.

The problem, analysts all agree, is Europe-wide, with increased instability throughout North Africa and the Middle East stemming from the Libyan and Syrian civil wars but encompassing chaotic, repressive or failing regimes in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and Kosovo.

The 28 member states of the European Union received 570,800 claims for asylum in 2014, up 44 percent from the year before, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, with Germany and Sweden alone accounting for 43 percent of those claims.

But there is no unified immigration or asylum system and only a voluntary willingness, after a major fight among European Union countries, to sharing even 40,000 refugees.

Mr. Cameron has been accused of insensitivity by highlighting the problems posed to “holiday makers” and referring to “swarms” of migrants, a term that critics said dehumanized people trying to get to a better life. Yvette Cooper, a leadership candidate for the Labour Party, criticized Mr. Cameron for playing politics and said that “only serious Europe-wide and international intervention” will “get to grips with this problem.”

Mr. Cameron has limited options. Britain, which does not allow passport-free travel, relies on France for border security in Calais. It has worked to keep good relations with France on the issue, which also matters since Mr. Cameron needs the support of President, François Hollande for changes to its relationship with the European Union. Mr. Cameron has promised voters a referendum on British membership in the bloc by the end of 2017.

An open fight with France over a few thousand migrants would not be helpful, and Mr. Hollande, too, wants an end to the trouble that is damaging his own fragile economy.

5千非法移民跳火車 英、法聯防

英國首相卡麥隆七月卅一日召開緊急國安會議，允諾為法國港口城市加萊提供更多保安圍籬和警犬，協助法國警方驅逐試圖透過英法海底隧道非法入境英國的移民。

愈來愈多抵達法國的非洲或中東移民最近搏命跳上行經英法海底隧道的火車，非法入境英國。卡麥隆是在部分英國政界人士建議動用軍隊加強邊防之後，召開這次會議。海底隧道的營運單位歐洲隧道集團表示，旅客及貨物疏運受移民活動影響至少延誤一個小時。

該集團透露，企圖闖隧道的移民人數暴增，從過去的六百人增至五千人，難以應付。卡麥隆說：「這種情況無法接受，我們將提供更多圍籬、資源和警犬隊。我稍晚會和法國歐蘭德總統通電話，口頭感謝他增派警力遏止移民進入隧道的努力。我們將攜手努力，緩解法國邊境的壓力。」英國已投入兩千兩百萬英鎊（約合台幣十億元），改善英法海底隧道的安檢措施。

英法兩國廿多年前達成協議，在隧道兩端的對方境內設檢查站；英國移民署檢查站設在法國的科凱勒，法國移民署檢查哨設在英格蘭肯特郡的切里敦。換句話說，這些移民若要從法國搭火車到英國，其實要通過英法兩國檢查哨才得以入境。

移民問題一直是卡麥隆執政的燙手山芋。目前每年進入英國的移民超過卅萬人。英國前移民事務部長格林說，卡麥隆拒絕批評法國遏止非法移民不力，是不願激怒法國，以免法國不再承擔阻止移民混入英國的義務，從而使亂象的場景從法國的加萊轉移到英國的肯特郡。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/world/europe/at-channel-tunnel-migrant-crisis-evolves-into-a-political-one.html

2015-07-31．聯合報．A17．國際．編譯陳韻涵