These crossings took place on board 27 boats and exceed the previous record, which dated from November 2021.
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The attractiveness of the United Kingdom is not weakening. Some 1,295 migrants crossed the Channel on Monday August 22 from France on small boats to reach the English coast. This is a new one-day record reached despite successive plans by the British Conservative government to curb the phenomenon of illegal immigration, according to London.
These crossings took place on board 27 boats and exceed the previous record dating from November 2021, said the British Ministry of Defense. They bring to 22,670, according to the Press Association count, the number of migrants who have made this very dangerous journey since the beginning of the year, against only 12,500 on the same date in 2021.
Over the whole of 2021, 28,500 people arrived in the United Kingdom in this way, marking a record since the surge in these crossings in 2018 in the face of the increasing lockdown of the French port of Calais and the Channel Tunnel. A recent British parliamentary report estimated that the total could reach 60,000 this year. The British Conservative government, which has made the subject a priority since Brexit, nevertheless pays millions of pounds to France to help it strengthen surveillance of the coasts, and is also increasing measures to toughen the reception of migrants.
At least 203 people have died or gone missing, at sea or on land, trying to reach England from the northern coast of France since 2014, including 27 in a single day at the end of 2021 in a shipwreck, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).