A French report said the United Kingdom is not sufficiently co-ordinating with France in efforts to reduce the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, as part of a broader assessment pointing to the 鈥渦ncertain effectiveness鈥 of illegal migration policies.
France is 鈥渟truggling to develop operational co-operation arrangements" with the U.K., according to the report published Thursday by France鈥檚 Court of Accounts, a body in charge of auditing the use of public funds, independent from the government and parliament.
The report refers in particular to a joint intelligence unit created in 2020 to fight human smuggling and reduce the number of people risking their lives to cross the Channel illegally. In 2022, it helped dismantle seven illegal migration networks.
The Court 鈥渇ound that the British don't provide usable information on the departures of small boats, and give very general, first-level information that has not been counter-checked.鈥
Information on the circumstances in which migrants arrive and their nationalities and on boats 鈥渁ppears to be very patchy," the report said. 鈥淭he relationship between France and the U.K. is therefore unbalanced in terms of information and intelligence exchange.鈥
The U.K. Defence Ministry estimated that crossings of the English Channel by boat increased by at least 58% between 2021 and 2022, a year that saw over 45,000 migrants arrested on British shores.
The report said 56% of crossing attempts were prevented that same year 鈥 unchanged from the year before.
The British government announced this week that the number of migrants crossing in 2023, to just under 26,000. The U.K. Home Office said Wednesday that another 26,000 鈥渙f these dangerous, illegal and unnecessary crossing attempts were prevented in 2023 thanks to our partnership with France.鈥
France in recent years has stepped up efforts to prevent migrants from crossing the Channel, including through more police, equipment and facilities. The country received 222 million euros (US$243 million) from the U.K. from 2018 to 2022 as part of a bilateral agreement and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last March for the 2023-26 period.
The number of people living illegally in France is unknown, but researchers from the Pew Research Center estimated their numbers in 2017 to be , in a country of 67 million inhabitants. This is about three times fewer migrants with no legal status than in the U.K. and Germany.
The Court of Account's report assessed a series of other issues related to illegal immigration policies, which were subject to 133 changes in law in the past decade.
It pointed to the difficulty of implementing orders to leave the national territory, despite France carrying out the most deportations in the European Union. More than 150,000 such decisions were made in 2022 and only 10% of the concerned people actually left, it said.
Amid recent debate over an that focused largely on how to , the report said that 鈥渋nternational comparisons suggest that a change of scale is not realistic鈥 regarding such policies.
U.K. authorities sent back about 3,500 people to their home country and Germany sent back about 13,000 people in 2022, according to statistics gathered by the French Interior Ministry.
Reasons listed by the report include French authorities' difficulty to prove the identity of the concerned migrants, reluctance from home countries to issue authorization to let them in and refusal by commercial airlines and plane pilots to take them on board.
___
Jill Lawless in London contributed to the story
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