particularly with Ethiopia, which means you have all these people who are recruited into the army on indefinite military service. This drives many people to leave and a few steps down the line you get all these Eritreans turning up in Europe and wanting to seek asylum. A war between Ethiopia and Eritrea would likely increase migration from the region — from Eritrea and potentially from affected parts of Ethiopia.”
A fifth of migrants crossing Channel on small boats are Eritreans
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Eritreans have overtaken Afghans, who crossed in the largest numbers for the past two years. More than 800 Afghans have arrived so far this year.
Eritreans accounted for a fifth of the 6,642 migrants to have crossed in small boats this year and were crossing at nearly triple the rate of last year. There were nearly 5,500 Eritreans in taxpayer-funded accommodation in Britain, half of whom were in hotels.
Border Force is often called to rescue people in overloaded dinghies in the Channel
GARETH FULLER/PA
The increased demand from migrants had attracted several Eritrean gangs to enter the illicit small boats trade. Intelligence gathered for the Home Office and the National Crime Agency (NCA) found a rising presence of Eritrean traffickers setting up on the French and British coasts.
Felix Sinclair, who leads the unit at the NCA that gathers intelligence on people-smuggling networks, said the Eritrean organised-crime groups appeared to have a good relationship with the Kurdish gangs, which dominated the trade in northern France, because they were able to provide large numbers with little notice.
“We’ve seen some Eritrean traffickers operating. It’s quite early to say with certainty but we’d probably put that down to the demand linked to Eritrean migrants,” he said. “This year Eritreans are by far the highest.”
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The NCA and Border Force suspected that some of those claiming to be Eritrean were from neighbouring Ethiopia, in particular from the Tigray region on the border, because they shared close linguistic, ethnic and cultural ties. The migrants tended to claim they were Eritrean to boost their chances of being granted asylum in Britain because the grant rate was 87 per cent compared with 58 per cent for Ethiopians. “We’re aware that migrants are told by facilitators what are the best nationalities to claim,” Sinclair said.
Major General Duncan Capps, head of the small boats operational command, said the surge in Eritreans reflected a wider trend of poorer migrants crossing the Channel. The increased demand from poorer migrants, compared with their relatively richer counterparts from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria and Albania, had pushed prices lower, he said.
However, people smugglers were packing more migrants on to the boats and making the journeys increasingly dangerous. Last year was the deadliest in the Channel and had at least 78 fatalities.
The average number of migrants in each of the 119 recorded boats that crossed this year was 56, compared with 53 last year and 49 the year before.
There were also increasing numbers of migrants who could not afford to pay and were “rushing” the dinghies and forcing themselves on board once they had been launched off beaches in northern France.
The “rushing” of packed boats has become an increasing problem
SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Capps said: “You are finding that you are having a lot of migrants coming across who are from poorer countries. So, broadly, central Africa, sub-Saharan Africa … They take a long time to get here because they end up having to work through [their journey]. They tend to be put in slavery on the way through.
“But, because they get here with very little money, they are either paying low amounts, which means the facilitators put a lot more people on — so we’ve seen the average occupancy go up — but they are also surging the boats. That’s the piece that caused, towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year, so many fatalities.”
David Bolt, the outgoing chief inspector of borders and immigration, said in a report in March that the “opportunists” forcing themselves on to boats were typically “fit, young men or older teenagers”.
He said prices for the crossings had reduced while the numbers making the crossing had increased as “the facilitators looked to maximise their profits through a volume-based business model”.
There were signs that the Eritrean gangs were more violent than their Kurdish and Albanian counterparts who tended to dominate the trade.
On March 19, an Eritrean man was stabbed on a French beach after a smuggler thought he was phoning his friends to tell them his location to join a boat. He was actually using his phone’s torch to see where he was going. The man got on the boat but had to be rushed to hospital after a Border Force rescue vessel picked up the dinghy and took the migrants to Dover.The emergence of Eritrean people-smuggling gangs on the French and British coasts has been discussed at the weekly meetings that Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, chairs with Border Force, the NCA and intelligence agencies to plan efforts to combat the evolving tactics used by traffickers. The meetings are designed to target new gangs “hard and quickly before they can take root”, a Home Office source said.
Magnus Taylor, deputy director of the Horn of Africa project at International Crisis Group, a think tank, said there were already many reasons that Eritreans would want to leave their country but the prospect of a fresh war with Ethiopia over efforts by its landlocked neighbour to seize a port on its Red Sea coast would push even more to flee.
He said: “There’s a plentiful supply of Eritreans who want to leave the country, particularly young people, for whom there is compulsory military service. This can last a long time and prospects for younger people are poor. There’s a middle part of society that’s almost missing. You’ve got old people and you’ve got young people but the middle part of society is hollowed out because so many people leave.”
Taylor added: “There is this permanent preparedness for war in Eritrea,
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