Wouldn’t it be nice if the Rio Grande were 21 miles wide? Imagine that America’s southern border were not a river a determined man can wade across in a minute, but a heaving, freezing stretch of open ocean, criss-crossed by the world’s busiest shipping lanes. You might assume that would be a secured enough border, even under Joe Biden. You would be wrong.
Great Britain has precisely that moat: the English Channel. And yet for a variety of infuriating reasons, we are seeing huge numbers of illegal immigrants able to float over in dinghies. President Trump has taken notice. Just hours before he spoke on the subject recently, more than 500 people crossed over from a French beach in rubber dinghies.
The president warned Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, that he cannot keep ducking the subject. Illegal immigration is “killing your country,” he said; migrants from Africa, South America, and Asia are “invading Europe,” and the “UK is a prime suspect.” More direct than delicate European ears want to hear? Certainly. But also correct.
Shakespeare called the Channel a “moat defensive to a house.” It kept out the Spanish Armada in 1588, Napoleon in 1805, and Hitler in 1940. What the great tyrants of European history could not achieve with fleets and armies, young men in inflatable boats now achieve before breakfast. More than 200,000 have arrived this way since 2018.
For scale, the full trained strength of the British Army is around 70,000 soldiers; by some measures, it is its smallest since the 1790s. We have waved ashore nearly three armies’ worth of overwhelmingly military-aged men, and removed barely four in every hundred.
Why can a serious country not defend a 21-mile sea border? Because our governing class has surrendered to what Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind Brexit, calls the “algal bloom” of lawyers, NGOs, and bureaucrats. Crucially, despite Brexit freeing us up from being a satrapy to Brussels and the anti-democratic organs of the European Union, Britain remains bound by international law.
We are still subservient to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a treaty interpreted by judges in Strasbourg in France, and to a domestic Human Rights Act that lets taxpayer-funded lawyers and activist charities litigate nearly every deportation, usually on the grounds that removal would breach a claimant’s “right to family life.” Imagine if every ICE removal could be appealed to a court in a foreign city, with the ACLU on retainer at public expense. That is the British system.
And who is arriving? Are they future doctors and engineers? Well, this week a court in Manchester sentenced Both Douk Deng, a (supposedly) 21-year-old South Sudanese man who left his wife and child behind to break into Britain, and refused asylum three times. In response, he turned up at an elementary school carrying a hammer, a hatchet, a seven-inch knife, and half a liter of petrol.
He wanted, his defense lawyer told the court, to “create a scene for attention.” He will serve about a year, and then in all likelihood remain in Britain anyway; even the sentencing judge complained that the Home Office ‘”should be doing something rather than nothing.”
In the face of such a total state-capacity failure, ordinary Britons have started doing things themselves. In Crowborough, a genteel Sussex town of 20,000, the government deposited 350 single adult male asylum seekers into a former army camp. Residents have formed an 81-strong volunteer patrol (all unarmed, of course, this being England) that walks the streets three times a day so that women feel safe coming home.
To be clear, I think it is a tragedy that Brits have lost faith in the state’s ability to protect them. David Betz, professor of war in the modern world at King’s College London, warns that Britain now exhibits the classic preconditions of serious civil strife, and that our rulers are doing nothing to arrest the slide. I pray he is wrong. I fear he is not.
The United States, we are constantly told, is a nation of immigrants. England is not. It is the nation of the English, culturally continuous for over a thousand years, which absorbed small, compatible groups (such as French Protestants known as Huguenots) slowly over many years. We have traditionally been an exporter of people, seeding the New World and for a time ruling over much of the rest.
The end of the Second World War saw that change, with Afro-Caribbeans, Indians and Pakistanis moving to Britain. There is a claim that they came in response to a call for help to rebuild. This is untrue, and the post-war Labour government actually tried to stop the first loads coming. This led to integration issues, with some groups assimilating better than others.
But in the last few years, we have seen what is now called the “Boriswave”: after Brexit, Boris Johnson’s government loosened the visa rules, and net migration hit 906,000 in a single year, more than the population of San Francisco, into a country smaller than Oregon.
And our absurdly generous welfare state removes any pressure to integrate at all. Households containing foreign nationals now draw nearly £1 billion (around $1.3 billion) a month in welfare payments, with roughly 1.5 million migrants claiming our main out-of-work benefit.
This scale of immigration is threatening to tear Europe apart. Poland has been prosecuting, and then acquitting, soldiers who fired warning shots at migrants prising apart its border fence with a car jack. Those migrants were flown in and pushed forward by Belarus and Russia as a deliberate weapon against NATO; one Polish soldier has been stabbed to death on that frontier. The rise of the AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen in France is similarly fuelled by these sorts of concerns.
The British and European peoples are, by instinct, tolerant, patient, and kind. But Donald Trump is right to say that this invasion must be stopped before it kills Europe. A moat is no use when the drawbridge is down. It is time to raise it.
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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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