By Miles Ellingham

Copyright newstatesman

After the Calais Jungle burned, the only migrants that remained were the birds. The square mile, where thousands of questing men looked north, has been rewilded with marsh flowers and rugged grass. There are no more celebrity visits, no Banksy murals, no Tom Stoppard theatre workshops; just a few early morning duck hunters, a birdwatching observatory and, occasionally visible across the sea, England.

A decade ago, this stretch beyond the N216 motorway housed almost 10,000 people. There were radio stations, churches, mosques, a market street, even a nightclub. But in the end governmental consensus couldn’t abide the Jungle – it became too unstable, unsanitary and unsafe. When night came, some of its inhabitants would obstruct the motorways and crowd on to halted trucks. Many of them died this way, others attacked drivers in their desperation. People began to fear the Jungle; even the volunteers who helped build it grew exhausted by its terrible complexity. When the demolition crews arrived in 2016, it was set alight and those same volunteers gathered on a hill, watching the flames.

That year, the French tried formalising another camp further east but its inhabitants attacked each other, then it burned too. It was decided nothing like the Jungle should ever grow back. Port security was tightened and migrants were prohibited from establishing permanent settlements. Tailed by police, the migrants became vagabonds along the coastline, forced into the margins of canals and ghettoised into areas of eerie woodland. But world events kept pushing more people towards France. When the lorries became difficult to penetrate, a new, deadlier route was opened: boats began to arrive in Kent.

These boats unearthed a buried fear in Britain. It had to be Calais – our old possession, close to the launch sites of foiled invasions from Napoleon and Hitler. British politics has been quick to seize on this fear. Gradually, the migrants metamorphosed from unwitting fragments forced into motion by humanitarian crisis to an invasive force of criminals and sexual predators. Politicians and agitators insist they are a threat to British schoolgirls – “our girls” – a sentiment that spread across the country over the summer.

In our reporting, we have spent time in camps across northern France and spoken at length to the migrants who passed through. We’ve approached aid workers, politicians, locals, policemen and town planners. The picture that emerges pertains not just to a failure of policy, but a failure of humanity. Beneath the political slogans and misapprehension, there is a terrifying, neglected reality. No one who arrives at the border is quite the same when they leave.

It’s late August, the tail end of the crossing season. Due to rough seas, no boats are expected this week. So, on a rubbish-strewn towpath, some dozen Arab men lounge around a makeshift firepit. September is coming, and soon the crossing will be more dangerous. They’re running out of time.

The raggedy tents are erected between stone boulders installed by the French authorities to deter encampments. This particular congregation, like virtually every other we visit around here, is defined by a common ethnicity and culture that provides a kinship with which to mitigate the misery.

The most forthcoming are Maahir from Syria, Mahmoud from Gaza, Yousef from Egypt and Abdullah from Kuwait. How did they all meet?

“When I first arrived in Calais,” explains Yousef, who comes from a village near Alexandria, “I met a Sudanese guy, he gave me a cigarette and said, ‘Egyptians stay over there.’” Most of Calais’s Sudanese population live in a hangar on the outskirts of the town. The Eritreans are somewhere else. “You meet people… then you meet your people,” we were told within days of our arrival.

The living conditions are appalling. Many wear worn-down sliders and broken Crocs. Rashes resembling scabies are visible on bandaged hands. The group watches over an infant girl. She’s coughing profusely; one of them brings her a cookie. Ahmed removes his right slipper to display a missing toe, blown off, he says, in an Israeli strike in southern Gaza. Others endure wounds inflicted by government security forces and gangs along the road to northern France.

Abdullah stretches out his mangled wrist. “From the king of Kuwait,” he explains, the result of torture for taking part in anti-government protests. Abdullah, a former shepherd, is a unique member of the gathering; he was granted asylum in the UK five years ago and lives in Liverpool, servicing cars. He only returned to northern France to help bring his ageing mother across. He has enough money to get her into a lorry instead of a boat. This option is expensive, but considered safer and more reliable. From the perspective of the British government, Abdullah is a people smuggler.

Nearly every story begins with an escape. Mahmoud escaped the Israel Defence Forces; Hassan, a baby-faced 20-year-old Iraqi, escaped three times, first from the Islamic State, then family persecution, then a detention centre in Bulgaria; Maahir fled Damascus after the fall of the Assad regime last December. Having been a poster-boy junior athlete during his national service, Maahir fears reprisals by the new Islamist regime. The trained lifeguard and semi-professional distance runner speaks conversational English. He hopes to be reunited in Birmingham with his sister, who has been diagnosed with cancer. He wants to become an NHS nurse.

Maahir lists off defining European experiences: arrested three times in France, beaten and racially abused in Greece, chased by dogs through the forests south of Calais. “I expected French society to be better,” he says. “It’s the graveyard of dreams.” Several of his comrades grunt in agreement before piling in. Mahmoud was robbed not long after arriving in Greece. A Palestinian man on crutches tells us that, contrary to his expectations, Europe has “no respect”. Here, it’s widely accepted that the continent west of the Ural Mountains is made up of two distinct entities: Europe and Britain.

The police, inevitably, move in and shepherd the men away. The migrants knew this was coming; they were warned ahead of time by the aid workers, but the frustration is palpable. Tents are packed by muscle memory, some men leave them by the canal. According to Human Rights Observers (HRO), a non-profit that documents police activity, there were at least 44 evictions in the Calais area last month. Abdullah can’t understand why the French aid groups and the French state want different things. “Can you see the contradiction?” he asks.

The defining post-Jungle French policy is called “zero fixation”. It ensures the migrants cannot settle. A police union spokesperson said it also disrupts people smugglers. Regardless, it is unrelenting. Last year, the police evicted 14,729 people from the area. Private cleaning teams, contracted by the public authorities, seized 1,685 tents, 189 tarpaulins and roughly 100 mattresses. What happens to these items is unclear.

Tents come and go. If you can’t buy one and the aid groups are running low on stock, you have to find – or steal – one. The Palestinian on crutches demonstrates his technique, honed to a single fluid motion. When the tent is taken, your passports, phones or asthma inhalers can be taken with it. According to HRO’s annual report, the equivalent of two and a half articulated lorries of personal belongings were confiscated last year.

Evictions often take place deliberately early, and the Calais migrants need sleep. You can see the effects of the zero fixation policy in their eyes; sometimes they talk to you like they’re dreaming. The policy is also costly to administer. At times, Calais feels like an expo for French cops: the French National Police, the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS – the ones who make the news for seriously injuring protesters), the French Border Police and the local bobbies are all here.

The various police forces in Calais have a wealth of technology. They peer through infrared binoculars, intercept migrants using heat scanners and carbon dioxide and heartbeat detectors. An aerial net of drones has been cast in the sky. The French have reportedly been reluctant to accept British technology, but they seem happy to accept British money. In 2023, the UK government roughly doubled the sum it allocates to France to mitigate the migration issue, earmarking almost half a billion pounds over the next three years. The Home Office did not respond to the New Statesman’s request for comment.

In 2003, the UK moved its border with France to Calais. The port city was transformed; the dock became a labyrinth of electric fences and security cameras. The border has affected the politics of Calais, too. From 1971 to 2008, the mayoralty belonged to the French Communist Party before swinging to the centre right. We attempted to interview the mayor, Natacha Bouchart, but all we got was her deputy. Philippe Mignonet met us at the reception of the town hall, only to explain that he doesn’t speak with British media. “I’ve done thousands of interviews for tourism, for industry, for whatever. Everything goes back [to] immigration. So I don’t answer any more… the door is there.”

There is money in Calais and it’s not just being spent on the police. You can see it in the city’s expensive-looking tourism drive. Most readily in the 12m-high, animatronic “Calais Dragon” – surely one of the worst tourist attractions in Europe, possibly the world – built in 2019 as part of a €46m “Calaisfornia” renovation of the seafront. For some reason, a million people come to see the dragon every year. On our visit, a gaggle of holidaymakers stare blankly at it through their cameraphones.

In comparison, Calais’s volunteers have shallow pockets. There are hundreds of them. NGOs like Oxfam, the Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières don’t appear to be a dominant presence. More noticeable is a constellation of smaller organisations and groups that do what they can with limited resources.

GB News recently sent the journalist Patrick Christys to northern France. He spent a portion of his trip interviewing Sudanese migrants, suggesting that they “try another country”, before commenting on how badly their living conditions smelled. Christys’ reporting saddled us with significant difficulties as no Sudanese migrants wanted to be interviewed after their interaction with “that British journalist”. He has also called Calais charity workers “borderline national traitors”.

The worst thing you could say about these volunteers is that spending time with them sometimes feels like revisiting your old student union. Some organisations run via collective decision-making (lots of talking) and feel strongly about semantics. Some say “migrants” should be referred to as “people on the move”, and a more sympathetic term for “camps” are “living spaces”. Every migrant we spoke to called them “camps”.

That said, much of their work is indispensable. Calais Food Collective administers the majority of water drops (8,000 litres per day) in the area on a budget of roughly €100,000 a year. The Maria Skobtsova House provides a vital haven for women and children. Others facilitate rare, joyous moments. Twice a week in a warehouse compound near a local church, Secours Catholique, a French non-profit, runs a drop-in centre where people on the move can briefly find dignity and normality.

Secours Catholique has crafted an area for people of different nationalities to attend, offering cigarettes, bottomless tea and coffee, football, phone-charging stations and barbers. The young men who come are not dissimilar to British lads, only they appear to drink less. A keepy-up circle forms. The ball falls with a sense of fate and people are gradually eliminated. Next door, there’s a separate space for women and children. The border has taught the children a new game: they check each other’s passports.

In the UK, a number of questions and assumptions have been voiced concerning migrants and immigration policy, some more cynical than others. The loudest assumption is that a large proportion of the migrants of northern France are “economic migrants”. Of everyone we spoke to, only one stated that he had left because of the job market. The rest recalled genocidal militias, air strikes, repressive regimes, religious persecution, torture, mutilation and death.

But the “economic migrants” critique obscures the obvious reality that a person can be both in need of work and fleeing for their life. This is true of Maahir, who wants to become a nurse, and Mahmoud, the Palestinian who wants to become a lawyer. Safety and prosperity are not mutually exclusive.

Another question asked is why don’t migrants choose to claim asylum in the first “safe” country they reach? Well, many already do – both Spain and Italy received more asylum claims than the UK last year. And following the question’s logic, if everyone settled immediately, they would all simply bottleneck in Europe’s border countries (some of which, according to rights groups, are not safe for migrants). Migrants also don’t always enjoy the luxury of choice. Maahir was denied asylum in Germany and handed a deportation order. Hope, an Ethiopian single mother, was halfway across the Channel with her son when the boat’s engine cut out, and the Maritime Gendarmerie towed it all the way back. She’s now considering staying in France, though speaks fluent English.

Why do migrants want to come to the UK? This one’s complicated, as many don’t. The demography of successful asylum applications in France leans towards Francophone African countries (as well as Ukraine and Afghanistan). Likewise, the majority of migrants we spoke with cited culture, language and decency as key reasons for choosing the UK. Usually there are historical ties.

“Don’t forget that Britain was an integral part of Libya,” noted Rami, a former journalist who fled Benghazi after a militia began threatening his family. Many of these migrants are headed for England in part because they believe it can’t be worse than their experiences in France, Spain or Italy. But that’s an assumption; they can’t be certain.

In the camps around Calais, migrants cling to an idealised Britain – a country few of them have ever been to. “You are treated as a human being… you are not defined by your religion or nationality,” says Rami, whose belief is based on previous interactions with British people. Time and again, Britain is painted as a country of minimal racism and unparalleled societal integration. It is an idea largely intuited, much like Britons’ assumptions about migrants: on both sides of the Channel people chat with friends, they watch the Premier League, they scroll through TikTok and Instagram. It’s possible Nigel Farage will win the next election, and turn Britain into a country of mass detention and deportation – a place where asylum is banned. Perhaps then migrants will think about the UK differently. Perhaps we all will.

There are many questions that are not asked of our immigration system but should be. Why, for instance, does the UK continue with policies of deterrence that, when they aren’t coupled with diplomacy, have repeatedly failed to deter?

Irregular migration (a legal term for what some call “illegal” crossings) has more than doubled since 2018, peaking at almost 50,000 in 2022. The Tories passed various restrictive laws in order to drive down this number. The most successful migration deal seemed to be the one they reached with the Albanian government in 2022, which allowed for Albanians arriving on small boats to be returned. The following year, irregular crossings by Albanians fell by almost 93 per cent.

Other legislation proved fruitless, such as the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act, which stated that any migrant coming via a “safe” country, such as France, would have their claims deemed “inadmissible”. This didn’t mean applications were rejected, only that they would not be processed. But people kept coming.

A year later, the Conservatives passed the Illegal Migration Act, widening the “inadmissibility” category while placing a duty on the Home Office to remove unauthorised arrivals. But to where? The United Kingdom had no deportation agreement with Afghanistan, Iran, Syrian, Eritrea or Sudan – the five most common nationalities that make irregular crossings. Neither did it have one with France. Brexit took the UK out of the Dublin Regulation, which enables EU countries to deport asylum seekers to the first EU country they entered. Even the Tory’s flagship deterrent, the Rwanda plan, proved an expensive failure.

Under a Labour government, the UK has tried a new approach, announcing its “one in, one out” policy, which essentially states that for every migrant the UK sends back to France, we take another in return. This policy has barely been trialled at scale, and is, ironically, dependent on irregular crossings. Only two of the migrants we spoke to, Hope and Hassan, were aware of it. Yet Hassan, who fears being forcibly returned to a Bulgarian detention centre, could explain the legal intricacies of the Dublin Regulation and why the UK’s withdrawal was to his advantage. “The main reason I am coming to Britain is because of protection from deportation, because of Dublin.”

The biggest question is how, in a country like France, the misery of these camps is allowed to persist.

Loon-Plage, a dusty clearing of grass and plastic sandwiched between an A-road and a Total diesel refinery, is the closest thing to the old Jungle that survives today. It’s named after the local parish. No one knows exactly what to call it.

The sunrise bleeds gold on to the aid distribution point at Loon-Plage. One man prostrates himself for the morning prayer, another emerges from the bushes fastening his trousers. Thousands of displaced people are asleep, hidden in the surrounding woodland. There are no toilets. No kitchens. No showers.

A few miles away, dozens of CRS officers are completing their morning routine at a hotel that has been booked out exclusively for them by the French government. They are about to mobilise for a mass eviction operation. Commander Obry, a middle-aged bruiser with the strut of a wartime colonel, completes his uniform with a pair of aviators. All the volunteers who work in Loon-Plage seem to know about Commander Obry.

Two young women from HRO are on their daily eviction patrol. They follow a planned circuit documenting evictions for potential legal evidence. Police activity has been quiet over the past few days; they assume today will be the same. A couple of weeks ago, one of them was at the distribution point when a masked man pulled out a handgun and emptied a magazine into a refugee’s leg. These shootings are becoming more regular.

When they pass the hotel there are no police vans at the car park. They drive on before arriving at a lay-by in the woods. Neither of the 24-year-olds have seen a mobilisation on this scale before. Speeding back to warn the camp residents, they turn on Spotify. French hip-hop blares from a small, portable speaker. “Fuck le 17!” they sing along.

The migrants of Loon-Plage are waking now, stretching their legs among rats, litter and human faeces. One mile away, a group of private contractors are stuffing confiscated tents into the back of a van while Obry marches through the woods. They say they don’t know where the van is going, but they have to clear the area. One of them finishes a Red Bull and hurls it into the bush.

Back at the camp, five young Kurdish teenagers decide whether or not to call an ambulance for their friend who can hardly stand. He can’t swallow either and has been vomiting for the past 24 hours: a consequence, they suspect, of having slept without a tent or a blanket for days. The emergency helpline operator doesn’t know when an ambulance will arrive. One of the boys passes the time by scrolling through images of Iceland on his phone. Maybe, one day, he’ll get there.

In the past, people have located purgatory in various corners of the world: down a pit in Donegal or inside Mount Etna. Loon-Plage is nowhere. The locals avoid it, NGOs struggle to penetrate it, the French authorities are failing to police it. Occasionally, this place tricks you with its beauty – there are moments when the branches refract the light and a breeze comes through. Its clearings are punctuated with tents and discarded objects. If you squint, it almost resembles the shabby reaches of a music festival.

In this place, reality disappears. There is no certainty in Loon-Plage. You are never sure of what you see or hear. One man from Afghanistan says he was granted asylum in the UK but left to go to a wedding in France and someone stole his documentation. Now he’s here. Past bushes and railway tracks, a Kurdish-Syrian shepherd carries a set of DVDs labelled “liver one”, “liver two”, “liver three”. He was shot in the abdomen and underwent a botched operation. Part of the bullet remains lodged inside him. These CDs, he explains, are footage of the surgery. He hopes to present them to the NHS if he crosses the Channel.

Deeper inside the woods, a man holds a young boy somewhere between a hug and a headlock. The man is not the boy’s father. “He lost his parents!” the man says. The child looks terrified, like he’s suppressing the urge to cry. Suddenly they run away. The volunteers have seen that man before. He’s been here for months. They think he’s a people smuggler.

Finding a smuggler here is easy. Either someone provides a contact, or you wait until the evening and meet them as they move from tent to tent offering their services. The dinghy fare averages between £1,000 and £2,000 and the migrants say a competitive market has emerged. Some have the cash up front, others rely on relatives to wire the funds, or parts of it. An excitable Yemeni man, who only really wants to talk about gangster films and sports cars, says he had no money at all. The smugglers accept cash or bank transfers.

A significant number of women and children live in Loon-Plage. Hope, 34, broke into tears when recalling the month she spent there. Her tears are words. Sometimes she’d be able to get on a bus and shower at one of the hotels allocated for migrants in France. But these hotels are far away and the journey back to the sea is costly. In Loon-Plage, Hope would fall asleep with her young boy. Sometimes there would be gunshots, which would remind Hope of the armed men who occasionally tried to hit on her.

By midday, there are hundreds of people at the distribution point. When the two HRO volunteers pull up in their car, dozens form a frantic queue believing food has arrived. The Red Cross drops off meals here twice per day. There are also several makeshift shops where migrants sell snacks to those with change. Usually a medical team comes in the afternoon to run a clinic, but today it is staying away until the police have finished the eviction.

The closest shop is an Esso petrol station. Its owner, a portly middle-aged man, has a dangerous predicament. Several weeks ago, the police came in and demanded he sign an official decree prohibiting him from selling fuel to migrants. He was reluctant, because the men who buy it can be intimidating. But he doesn’t want to upset the police and the officers weren’t there to negotiate. They hovered over the till, blocking off customers until he complied. “I’m not able to put this decree into practice,” he says. He wrote in brackets above his signature, “I am afraid for my life!”

Returning from far-removed tents, the volunteers discover their route back to the car has been blocked by police. They have to take a new route back, which takes them over a bridge made of crushed trolleys and into a clearing guarded by a man sat in a chair checking his phone.

“What you doing here?” he demands. It’s as if they’ve stepped out of France and into a new jurisdiction. He waves, beckoning another man who is nursing a beer. He has piercing green eyes and a scarf hanging from his head like a trap star. He walks right up to their faces and stares them down. This feels like a checkpoint. “You go there,” he says, signalling left, “never there.” The volunteers oblige.

Around midday the police descend on the distribution point. Everyone runs. When the volunteers reach the police line, a Kurdish man with a London accent is cursing the cops. He says they’ve confiscated his friend’s passport, pointing to one of the men that flank him. “Tell them everyone here has a fucking gun,” he insists. “If [the police] come here, everyone is going to fucking die.”

For a minute, there’s a stand-off. But the tension is broken when an Eritrean woman walks between the factions and asks the police to return her daughter’s glasses. Commander Obry strides up to the line. He’s having none of it. All anyone can do is watch as the bulldozers raze the camp’s basic infrastructure. When the police finally disperse, there is only rubble. The migrants rebuild their world.

After Loon-Plage, there’s the sea. People wonder why the migrants risk their lives crossing the Channel; 82 of them died in it last year. But beyond it lies a sister in Birmingham, the prospect of a job in Liverpool, a room with a bed perhaps and no more police harassment. Across it lies another life. First, though, they have to traverse it successfully. Many attempt the crossing several times.

People change on the long walk to the beach. When the water comes into view, the solidarity and affection that’s been growing between the migrants melts away and panic makes most selfish. Some act virtuously. Maahir’s tenth attempt was unsuccessful because he helped a pregnant woman on to a boat. At the time of writing, the last woman to die with her child in the Channel was a Turkish mother and her son who drowned off the coast of Gravelines. The boy is thought to have been eight years old.

On the way to the boats, the drones come. This adds to the panic. The migrants have seen drones before, buzzing in the skies above Gaza and Sudan. To minimise injuries, the French police currently do not enter the water unless they are asked to do so by the migrants, though the French government is reviewing this approach. Migrants often wait waist-high in the sea without lifejackets to escape the police before they board.

At least two migrants we spoke with have since made it to the UK. Rami’s voyage began at 7am and took 11 hours. Halfway across, the engine failed and the overcrowded 9m raft ferrying some 90 people, including pregnant women and children, drifted with the current. Hours later, the inflatable tubing started to leak air and the boat began taking on water. People started to faint.

All the passengers were saved by the UK’s coastguard, just after 5pm. The rescue marked the end of Rami’s odyssey. He’s now in an asylum hotel in the north of England and can finally get some sleep. But his wife suffers recurring nightmares about their journey – what they call “the journey of death” – their days in northern France, the smugglers, the chaos. “Everything was like a bad dream.”

But there are bad dreams in Britain too. A week after returning from northern France, we attend a protest outside an asylum hotel in Epping, Essex. A few hundred people have gathered. An Ethiopian asylum seeker had been convicted of sexual assault against a 14-year-old girl. The crowd consists of seething men, excitable boys and outraged middle-aged mums. “Fucking bomb the place,” a man tells us. A small blonde child – presumably his – sits on his shoulders.

Again, reality disappears. One man wearing a St George’s flag like a cape recounts a recent incident involving two Muslims “hiding in a bush outside a primary school with a bag full of children’s clothes, a pair of scissors and wigs”. He thinks they were waiting to kidnap local kids. His source is Facebook. We think about Maahir and the “graveyard of dreams”. In reporting this story one increasingly realises there is no such thing as clarity, only a murky chaos enveloping hundreds of thousands of lives, reconstituting government policy, redefining what society means. And it never ends.