Britain To Pay $576 Million To A Pact With France To Stop Illegal Immigration

As part of an agreement with France to stop illegal immigration over the English Channel, the United Kingdom said on Friday that it will pay $576 million over the following three years.  The agreement was disclosed on Friday in Paris during a joint meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

According to a joint statement from the two nations, the funds would be used to build a new detention facility for migrants in France and to dispatch 500 security and support personnel “to ensure the earliest identification of attempted crossings” by small boats.

After years of tense discussions over immigration, fishing rights, a submarine agreement with Australia, and post-Brexit negotiations, the two presidents emphasized the close links between their nations on Friday.

The plan’s degree of ambition is exactly what we need, according to Macron, who also noted that this is not a deal between the UK and France but rather the UK and the EU.  The UK “will always comply with our international treaty responsibilities,” according to Sunak, who is facing fire from human rights organizations for his efforts to stop cross-Channel immigration with a new rule that is denounced as discriminatory, unlawful, and impractical.

The number of illegal immigrants who pay human trafficking organizations to get them into the UK in small, unseaworthy vessels has increased. Several of these boats have sunk, resulting in fatalities. The joint statement from the Elysee Palace, which was 19 pages long, concentrated on the potential for increased defense cooperation between the two nuclear powers, including everything from the stationing of fighter jets on one another’s aircraft carriers to the joint development of cruise missiles in the future. The presidents pledged better coordination about Ukraine, particularly concerning the delivery of supplies and weapons to Kyiv.

In the joint statement, they also promised to seek “security assurances” with Ukraine “that would assist [Kyiv] to defend itself long-term and to block possible future attacks.  They also promised support for the training of Ukrainian marines in the UK.

A new deal reached by the Prime Minister and President Macron in Paris today would utilize hundreds more French law enforcement agents and better technology to stop unauthorized Channel crossings.  For the first time, the UK will contribute to the cost of a prison facility in France to assist that nation in better managing the volume of people smuggled across the English Channel.  This new facility will aid French attempts to enhance custody capacity, enabling the removal of more migrants from the French coast who would otherwise take perilous and illegal routes to the UK.

The agreement reached today will more than quadruple the number of people deployed in northern France to deal with small boats, with more than half of them in place by the end of the year.  It builds on our current relationship, which saw twice as many illegal crossings halted in 2022 than in 2021. The UK will provide financial support for this.

A new, highly skilled, permanent French mobile enforcement squad that is focused on dealing with tiny boats will support efforts. As the UK and France increase intelligence cooperation to crack down on human trafficking routes, more drones, planes, and other technology, such as surveillance, will also be utilized.

A brand-new zonal coordination center with dedicated UK liaison officers will supervise these French efforts. To coordinate the reaction to an alarming trend that has seen an increase in illegal migration by 50% throughout Europe in the past year, the coordination center will bring together all relevant French law enforcement partners for the first time.  99% of those who reach British seas are stopped thanks to the UK’s own Small Boats Operations Command.

Our improved collaboration intends to help our long-term shared objective of totally closing this illegal migration route by increasing the interception rate for attempted crossings and dramatically reducing the number of crossings each year.

The deal reached today will result in increased collaboration between the UK and France upstream to halt illegal immigration at the source, in addition to the additional measures implemented to monitor the beaches in northern France.  This involves enhancing collaboration between the National Crime Agency and its French equivalent through agents stationed in nations along the traffickers’ preferred routes.

The Prime Minister has taken a variety of actions to stop illegal immigration since taking office, in addition to the agreement reached with France last year. This includes defining long-term goals for a UK-EU-wide deal on returns, which an objective France today reaffirmed they share, and reactivating the Calais Group of northern European countries to disrupt traffickers.  The UK government unveiled a bill this week to stop using unlawful immigration as a means of obtaining refuge there.

With the help of these measures, criminal groups that profit from this suffering will no longer have any reason to tempt individuals to risk their lives on perilous or pointless excursions.  Illegal immigrants will be apprehended and promptly returned to their home country, if it is safe to do so, or to another safe third nation, like Rwanda, where they will be given help to start over.

Anybody entering the UK unlawfully will be stopped from utilizing the nation’s leading anti-modern slavery resources or manipulating the legal system to thwart their expulsion. Removal will only be suspended in cases where someone argues that their transfer to a safe third country poses a genuine danger of significant and irreparable injury or because they do not belong to the group of people subject to removal under the Bill.

Other objections or human rights issues may only be heard remotely after removal. The bill would guarantee that the UK can better support those arriving through fair, safe, and legal ways by eliminating illegal immigration as a path to a refuge, halting the boats, and regaining control of our borders.

edited and proofread by nikita sharma