Quelle: The Guardian

Analysis: It is time to end the lie that a few hundred migrants trying to enter the UK via the Channel tunnel amount to a mass invasion

For once the Daily Mail has got it right with its demand to “End this Migrant Madness” but not in the way they mean it.

It is time to end this tabloid media pretence that nightly, repeated and mostly unsuccessful, attempts by a few hundred migrants to illegally enter Britain by way of the Channel tunnel amount to an invasion threat not seen since Hitler assembled his invasion barges in the autumn of 1940.

The “invasion thesis” is fuelled by the use of language that reduces the status of those who have fled from Syria, Eritrea and other failing states in the biggest movement of displaced people since the second world war to the single word of “illegals”.

David Cameron doesn’t help when he describes in an ITV interview those who have managed to cross the Mediterranean from north Africa – 110,000 alone so far this year – to Italy and Greece as “a swarm of people … wanting to come to Britain”.

It may be that he misspoke. His own home secretary, Theresa May, and other senior government ministers generally manage to discuss these complex migration issues without resorting to such nasty language.

As the United Nations’ Peter Sutherland put it on Thursday morning: “Anybody who thinks that by erecting borders and fences in some way a particular state can be protected from alleged ‘floods’ – which are anything but floods of migrants is living in cloud cuckoo land.”

First, let us be clear that Britain is not under some kind a existential threat of mass invasion through the Channel tunnel. The numbers of migrants and refugees in Calais have swelled in recent months to several thousands.

They came first because of the industrial action by the Calais port workers meant there was a new opportunity to try to get into the backs of the long queues of lorries stretching down the approach roads to the ferries beyond the normal security fences. Once more fences were put in to provide a temporary protection zone for those lorries, they moved their attention last week to the less well protected rail head to the Channel tunnel a short distance away at Coquelles.

The poor state of some of the security fencing at Coquelles is the responsibility of Eurotunnel. As the Sun newspaper graphically points out the same holes in the fence that migrants used to get through in 2002 are still there 13 years later.

All the pressure from the British and French governments is now on Eurotunnel to make the rail head secure as soon as possible. Once it is sealed it is likely to resolve the problem – at least until the striking French port workers take some new form of action and change the rules of the game once again.

It is sad fact that this week’s bout of “migrant madness” was triggered by a misleading Eurotunnel claim that 2,000 migrants had attempted to enter Britain on Monday night, without making it clear they meant many repeated attempts by the same group of a few hundred migrants. But the original claim was enough to leave the clear impression that Britain was now under nightly siege and the government was powerless to do anything about it.

But in terms of the overall flow of people in and out of Britain even several thousand potential illegal entrants to Britain it is still a marginal issue in terms of migration especially as the numbers who have made it through can be measured in the hundreds. The vast majority of people living illegally in Britain came in the front door – through Heathrow Airport – and simply overstayed their visas yet nobody calls for the troops to be sent into Heathrow.

It is easy for the British media, including the Guardian, to focus on what is happening at Calais. It is easy to send a camera crew to get footage of a group of migrants breaching the fences at Coquelles regardless of whether they manage to get lucky and subsequently jump on a train.

Despite the claims of some reporters that they are “extraordinary scenes”, they are not. They have been going on for years, not just at Calais but also along the coast at Dunkirk and Ostend and other ports, but with little success for the migrants.

What, however, is extraordinary is that the attempts of a few hundred migrants, many of whom may well be refugees fleeing war and persecution, has completely eclipsed the situation in the Mediterranean, where thousands do continue to attempt to cross. More than 3,000 were rescued by German and Italian ships in just two days last week. Italy has taken more than 60,000 refugees in the first six months of this year alone. Germany took 175,000 asylum seekers last year.

Britain took just 24,000. David Cameron continues to insist that nearly all those fleeing north Africa and the Middle East are economic migrants who should be returned from whence they came as rapidly as possible.

But others see hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing violence and persecution in a massive humanitarian crisis. In this context talk of this summer’s “migrant madness” over Calais begins to look grossly excessive.