The English Channel, just 34 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, is at once a jam-packed shipping highway, a symbol of the UK’s cultural distance from its European cousins, and a flashpoint for migration concerns fuelling the political agenda on both sides of the water.
Beyond separating Britain from France, the Channel could soon drive a wedge into the EU’s migration policy as a new returns deal between those two countries threatens to put further strain on an already fractured asylum system.
On Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron announced a migration deal operating on the principle of ‘one in, one out’, whereby the UK will be able to return asylum seekers to France "in short order" in exchange for accepting other migrants who have not made an illegal attempt to enter the UK, with a pilot phase to begin in the coming weeks.
It also gives the French police more powers to intercept boats in shallow waters near the coast, with the intention to significantly reduce the number of successful crossings — though NGO workers told The Parliament that those fleeing war, poverty and climate change are likely to find another, more hazardous, route.
The deal follows Macron’s state visit to the UK this week, the first for any EU leader since Brexit. The occasion shows the beginning of a rapprochement, four and a half years after the divorce was completed, but also a recognition of the growing need to work together in a more hostile world — closer coordination on nuclear weapons was also on the agenda.
But if the UK is an increasingly necessary partner to the EU on defence, security and trade, its interests when it comes to migration are not so aligned. Tens of thousands of migrants each year traverse the EU to board small boats bound for Britain; the latest figures from the UK Home Office say more than 20,000 made the crossing in the first six months of this year, up nearly 50% year on year.
Starmer, under growing electoral pressure from Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform party, is determined to reverse the trend. Unless the numbers are reduced at the source, that will mean more migrants staying in Europe.
“The small boat issue causes great public anger here, and therefore there's always a spotlight on the UK-French cooperation,” Peter Ricketts, a former UK ambassador to France, told The Parliament. “But that UK-French cooperation can only be embedded in a much wider coordination with other EU states.”
EU member states push back
Significant unease is brewing elsewhere in the bloc. When the deal began to take shape late last month, five countries bordering the Mediterranean — Italy, Greece, Spain, Malta and Cyprus — wrote to the European Commission to express their opposition.
“If confirmed, such an initiative raises serious concerns for us, both procedurally and in terms of potential implications for other member states, particularly those of first entry,” they wrote in the letter, reported by the Financial Times.
Under the EU’s Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers should have their claims processed in the first EU country they arrive in, before being distributed around the bloc. Intended to avoid migrants gaming the system by pursuing parallel claims in multiple countries, in reality this system has led to long backlogs in the most common countries of arrival, and large numbers of migrants staying there for a long period in legal limbo.
“Under the Dublin Agreement, they'll all be returned there [southern European countries]. It's just not workable. Nor is it fair. The EU needs to have a policy where people who come to the EU and claim asylum will have their claims considered,” Alexander Downer, a former Australian foreign minister and ambassador to the UK, told The Parliament.
“If they're found to be refugees, then they should be sent somewhere after the EU where they will receive appropriate protection,” added Downer, who was retained by the UK Home Office in 2022 to advise on a plan to send migrants to Rwanda, which was eventually scrapped under Starmer’s government.
The EU’s Asylum and Migration Pact, agreed by EU officials in May last year, was meant to create a more coordinated asylum system. Member states are supposed to adopt it by 2026, but as negative reporting about migration grows and far-right parties surge in elections across Europe, governments are increasingly turning to unilateral measures.
“We have a failed European common asylum system. Asylum migration is a common policy. But de facto, we are seeing that member states are just now taking a very individualistic approach,” Carmine Conte, senior legal policy analyst at the Migration Policy Group, told The Parliament. “Everyone is protecting his own interests.”
A European Commission spokesperson said it was working with the UK, France and other EU member states “to support solutions that are compatible with the spirit and letter of EU law.” The Commission’s focus is on the implementation of the existing legal framework, “in particular the Dublin rules,” the spokesperson told reporters on Wednesday.
Humanitarian concerns over expanded police powers
Think tanks and NGOs, meanwhile, have expressed doubts about whether the new system will work, and warned that it could cause more migrants to die at sea.
“If you close one border, there will be another one opening up. If you try to just crack down, for instance, on smugglers in the Channel, they will find another way to go to the UK, an even more dangerous and precarious way,” Conte said.
The deal between the UK and France would also expand the powers of French police, allowing them to intervene in shallow waters. French police have previously, when intercepting small boats, slashed them with knives to prevent them from launching.
Aid workers say slashing boats is not new and that legitimising the practice risks causing more harm. That’s particularly true for children, who are usually placed in the middle of boats for crossings. When the boats are cut, they collapse inwards, meaning the children in the middle are at higher risk of being crushed to death or drowning.
“Whether that's in shallow water or in deep water does not change the risk of people falling in on them when those boats are cut by the police,” Katie Hall, advocacy coordinator at Project Play, a grassroots NGO working with displaced children at the UK border in northern France, told The Parliament.
In 2024, 73 people died trying to cross the Channel in small boats, more than in the previous six years combined. At least 15 people this year have so far been reported dead or missing in the Channel.
Those on all sides of the debate agree that the EU’s migration policy as it stands is broken. And some argue that desperate people are being forced into ever-more dangerous crossings as a direct result of those policies.
“There is no way to come to Europe safely, legally, and claim asylum,” said Conte. “There are no university corridors, sponsorships, programmes — all these legal ways are very limited. So the majority of people are left in this huge limbo where they have no choice but to take a boat.”
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