Channel Crossings

This report investigates the British government’s responses to small boat Channel crossings, and how these responses in turn shaped the Channel borderzone and the lives of people who cross the English Channel.

Since 2018, the arrival of people across the English Channel in small boats to claim asylum has been represented as a ‘crisis’ of ‘illegal migration’ by politicians and policy makers under successive Conservative and Labour governments. Efforts to curb the number of people crossing the Channel have been central to electoral and governing strategies. The Conservative government introduced both the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which attempted to end the right of people to claim asylum entering Britain through this route. They also introduced the now defunct UK- Rwanda plan to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda. The Labour Government is currently pushing the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration bill 2025 through parliament. The Labour Government has also amended the ‘good character’ guidance for citizenship applications, laying the ground for rejecting nationality applications by people who entered the UK irregularly. Automatic detention, the criminalisation of people steering vessels, investment in policing in France and technologies to monitor the Channel, have all expanded in attempts to ‘stop the boats’. Ending the arrival of so called ‘illegal migrants’ has become a focus for far-right parties, movements and politicians.
This report explores how these policies have developed, why these government policies have been inadequate solutions to small boat crossings, and the effects that these policies and border security practices have had on people making these journeys.

This research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The report is based on four areas of research undertaken by the Channel Crossings project team (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) examining; 1) politics and policy 2) the impact on civil society of small boat Channel crossings, and government policy which seeks to stop them 3) the experiences of people who have crossed the Channel by small boat 4) the business of border security and infrastructure in the Channel. The report draws on data gathered through the qualitative analysis of 345 policy documents, 217 Home Office contracts (2018-2025) and 64 interviews carried out by the authors with policy makers, politicians, migrant rights advocates, NGO workers and with people who had crossed the Channel to claim asylum.