The Spectator: Macron doesn’t care about migrants crossing the Channel

The British magazine The Spectator published an article by journalist Gavin Mortimer on Britain's dissatisfaction with France because of its migration policy. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The British government is reportedly "frustrated" with France for its failure to stem the numbers of migrants making their way illegally across the Channel. 

What’s new? It’s a gripe going back years and the solution has always been the same: to throw more money to France in return for a solemn promise from Paris that patrols will be increased to reduce the numbers looking to enter Britain illegally. 

In February 2016, for example, David Cameron’s government announced it was giving €20 million (£17.2 million) more to France – on top of the €60 million (£52 million) already funnelled across the water – in order to boost "fighting trafficking networks". 

However, one junior minister in Francois Hollande’s government warned that the upcoming referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU could have an adverse effect on cross-Channel cooperation if the people voted to leave. The name of the minister who issued this veiled threat was one Emmanuel Macron. 

It was Macron, of course, who in March this year embraced Rishi Sunak warmly at an Anglo-French summit in Paris and then announced at a joint press conference that the two leaders had agreed a £480 million deal that would see the numbers of migrants drastically reduced. The numbers are slightly down on last year, when 45,000 migrants reached England, but over 16,000 have crossed in the first eight months of the year and last week 755 made the passage in one day.

But frankly, this was never going to reduce the numbers. Macron is a fervent believer in free movement, as evidenced by the rise in immigration during his six years in office. So what if three-quarters of the French don’t share his view? 

In an interview with Le Figaro this month, the president breezily declared that "France has always been a country of immigration and we will continue to be so". This was a rebuke to his political opponents who attributed last month’s devastating nationwide riots to the failure of France’s immigration policy over the last half a century.

It was not the first time Macron has stated this fact. He did so in 2021 and was corrected by Michèle Tribalat, the former director of the National Institute of Demographic Studies. "No, France has not always been a country of immigration," she explained. "Immigration really began in the second half of the 19th century." 

In 1872 there were 676,000 foreigners in France, 1.9 per cent of the population, a figure that stood at 1.16 million in 1911, just under 3 per cent of the population. In 2021 there were seven million, 10.3 per cent of the population.  

As Tribalat pointed out, the immigrants who arrived in France at the turn of the 20th Century were almost all Europeans: Belgians, Italians and Spanish. One hundred years later 48 per cent of immigrants in France were born in Africa, more often than not Algeria or Morocco.   

So in short, Britain should wise up and understand that Macron has no intention of helping to reduce the numbers of migrants crossing the Channel.  

The time has come to get tough, and implement a pushback policy, similar to the one deployed by the French police on their border with Italy since 2018. That year the Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini – now the deputy PM – claimed that French police were pushing back migrants across the border into Italy. This accusation had been verified by various human rights organisations, and only last week Médecins Sans Frontières issued a press release claiming that migrants were being ‘systematically pushed back at the Italian-French border by French police – often with violence, inhumane treatment as well as arbitrary detention’. 

This grave accusation barely made a ripple in the French media, even in those outlets that lean to the left, which expressed indignation about the British government’s amateurish attempt to fly migrants to Rwanda or the equally shambolic idea to house them on a barge. 

When Macron met Sunak in Paris in March there was much guff in the media about a ‘bromance’ between the two leaders. But from the moment he was elected president in May 2017 Macron has exhibited only a spiteful hauteur towards Britain. He is incapable of coming to terms with Brexit and, rather than respecting the decision of the majority of the British people, he has accused Leave voters of succumbing to "lies and false promises". 

The French political class know all about false promises. They made one to their own electorate in 2005, vowing to respect the ‘Non’ result of the EU referendum, only to then ratify it as the repackaged Lisbon treaty. 

And they have been fobbing off various British governments for the last decade with promises to tackle the Channel migrant crisis once they have a few more coffers. 

Britain must turn off the money tap, and turn back the boats. Macron will of course express his indignation – to which Britain should respond by exposing his hypocrisy.