France must face up to the Calais crisis

Telegraph View: The French government can't continue shirking its responsibility and passing the problems to Britain

Migrants walk along railway tracks at the Eurotunnel terminal in Calais Photo: PA

By Telegraph View

6:35AM BST 30 Jul 2015

13 Comments

Recent scenes at the French entrance to the Channel Tunnel are the product of international events that are hard to follow, let alone address. Many of the illegal immigrants attempting to pass through the tunnel to the UK have fled shattered nations like Syria, then entered the European Union in countries like Italy and Greece.

Plainly, more should be done to stabilise the nations from which these people have fled. And Europe needs a better answer to such arrivals, especially rules governing how illegal immigrants should be distributed among EU members, then swiftly removed where possible.

These are international problems that all countries affected have a role in resolving. But accepting that context is not incompatible with stating clearly that some countries are more responsible for these problems than others. In this case, much of blame belongs with France.

^{Calais migrant makeshift camp (Rex)}

The response of the French authorities to growing disorder around Calais has been inadequate. Only yesterday, long after these problems became apparent, did the French promise to deploy more police to the area. Even when the officers arrive, there are grave doubts about their effectiveness, since in many instances, the police response to illegal attempts to enter the tunnel is merely to drive the immigrants a short distance from the tunnel before releasing them, inevitably to return and try again.

Equally extraordinarily, Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister has written to Eurotunnel, a private company, seemingly blaming the firm for not doing enough to secure the tunnel entrance. That will not do. Securing French borders is the job of the French state.
That state is not known for either inefficiency or restraint in enforcing the will of the country’s politicians. It is extremely hard to imagine that illegal immigrants congregating in such numbers elsewhere in France would be treated with such apparently leniency.
There are strong grounds to suspect that the French government has deliberately taken a relaxed approach to detaining and removing immigrants near the tunnel because it regards permitting their departure to the UK as a cheaper and easier option than returning them to their countries of origin.
Frankly, the French are attempting to shirk their responsibilities and transfer their problems to Britain. Faced with a crisis that is international in nature, such national selfishness is simply unacceptable.
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