UK Hope and despair in the Calais migrant camps

A year after 27 people died trying to cross the Channel, people are still drawn by the dream of a better life in Britain

Wet and bedraggled on a rainswept November day, Badr is one of dozens of men who have arrived to pick up a tent and a sleeping bag from a charity operating out of a van in a car park in Calais. The 22-yearold from Syria has been in Calais more than a week, and his previous tent was taken by police four days ago. After that he slept under a footbridge, huddled with six others for warmth.

It is a year since at least 27 people were drowned when their boat capsized in the Channel, the worst disaster for 30 years. But while such a tragedy has mercifully not been repeated, partly thanks to better coordination between French and British coastguards, at first sight there is little other change in the wretched conditions faced by refugees in northern France.

Originally from Aleppo in northern Syria, Badr, then 13, and his family fled in the early stages of the country’s civil war in 2013 – “I didn’t want to fight because I didn’t want to kill anybody” – before ending up in Iraq, with his family scattered there and in Lebanon and Turkey, struggling for money and hope. But this year, he wants to join a brother in the UK and insists, after spending four days on a boat to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy, he has nothing left to fear.

“My heart is already dead. I don’t have any feeling left,” Badr said simply in Arabic. He hopes for better weather conditions to make the shorter journey across the Channel, which he said will cost €1,500 ($1,560), a fee typically paid by relatives to a people trafficker. It is not obvious Badr has a clear plan for life in Britain, but he said, “I want to help my family” and that “for work, Britain is much better” than either Germany or France.

But for the moment, Badr is trying to find a coat – the red blanket around him is rain sodden. The volunteers at Care4Calais, the charity giving out the tents and sleeping bags, promise to have a look in their stock – but the young man misses the connection, partly because the police have raided the squalid under-bridge site where he and a dozen others are sheltering.

There are perhaps 500 migrants, mostly single men, scattered around the most makeshift camps in and around Calais and a further 1,000 near Grande-Synthe, west of Dunkirk, where some families also stay.

Kasim, 24, and Sahil, 23, are students from Afghanistan and left to escape the Taliban. Kasim said it has taken them two months to cross

‘I didn't want to fight because I didn't want to kill anybody' dy'

Europe “mostly walking”, while Sahil was beaten in Bulgaria. Both complained of being threatened by the Taliban, Kasim for working as a driver for a minister under the western-backed government, and Sahil, a journalism student, for writing articles critical of the country’s new rulers.

At the camp sites, there is no sanitation and no drinking water, other than that provided by various charities. Open fires provide warmth while the state provides some food in Calais, but not near Dunkirk. Unless food is being handed out, the busiest part of the site is where people are charging their phones. Each national group tends to camp together in the Dunkirk scrub. There are Sudanese escaping Darfur, who either try to get on lorries, despite improved infrared detection, or hope that a people smuggler will allow them to fill a place on a boat; sometimes, Calais charities say, insisting they pilot a vessel 65km across the Channel without experience.

There are Kurds leaving Iraq and Iran, complaining of corruption, and Eritreans fleeing national service. If the migrants can endure the conditions and claim asylum in the UK, the proportion granted at initial decision

is often very high: 98% for Syria, 97% for Afghanistan and Eritrea, 92% for Sudan. But in France they are denied shelter and, as Sahil said, “we could not survive if it wasn’t for the charities”. The exception are the Albanians, who arrived in significant numbers from May this year, the Home Office said, crossing the Channel in small boats.

Lucy Halliday, a coordinator with Care4Calais, a charity that provides a range of welfare services in both Calais and Grande-Synthe, said: “The Albanians get across very quickly. They’re not hanging around in the camps. And they’re very secretive, very private.”

Britain and France treat the migrant situation as a security problem, even though there are labour shortages in the UK. Over the past three years, Britain has struck four agreements with France to pay for extra policing.

Yet the security effort struggles, even on its own terms. The numbers of people crossing the Channel in small boats is at record levels – it was 28,526 in 2021 and 8,466 in 2020, but this year the figure is more than 40,000.

There is something of a hamster wheel about the process. The police take and destroy migrants’ tents, then charities such as Care4Calais, using tents and bedding left behind at festivals, hand them out again.

Yet, on the ground, the human spirit remains undimmed. Migrants are often remarkably good humoured, willing to share their stories. Friendships, such as Kasim and Sahil’s, are forged on the journey. “It’s a game,” Kasim said. “You have to complete each step: we got through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, we got here. It’s another mission.”