Illegal immigration from across the Channel is a hot topic in England.

If anyone missed two reports from earlier in March 2024 about Migrants who want to leave the UK, here they are, courtesy of the Daily Sceptic‘s Will Jones, who prefaces his March 6 piece with this:

A growing number of illegal migrants are finding life in Britain so miserable, they’re desperate to leave. But we won’t let them.

How can that be?

The first report comes from The Telegraph‘s Michael Deacon, ‘This unbelievable farce sums up Britain’s immigration nightmare’ (emphases mine):

… According to reports, there is a growing number of people who have entered this country illegally, only to find that life in Britain is even worse than in whatever godforsaken hellhole they originally came from. Yesterday, for example, one newspaper carried an interview with a teenager from north Africa who arrived here last July via small boat. He said: “I hate Britain and wish I had never come here. I want to go back to France.”

Meanwhile, an illegal migrant from Sudan said: “I want to go anywhere else in Europe … There are many young migrants wanting to leave because there is nothing for them in the UK.” And last month, an illegal migrant from Syria said: “A lot of people who came over the Channel want to leave now – there is nothing for us here.”

A number of people living in England would heartily concur, but these migrants have a problem:

… They can’t leave Britain – because the police keep stopping them.

Take the illegal migrant from Sudan. Four weeks ago, the police caught him in Dover, trying to sneak aboard a truck bound for France. They then drove him all the way back to Preston in Lancashire, where the Home Office had housed him. The same thing happened to the migrant from Syria. He says he’s been trying to sneak out of Britain since last summer – but has been caught by the police every time.

What a remarkable situation. We’re hopeless at keeping people out. But we’re brilliant at keeping them in.

Deacon recommends a UK-led propaganda programme in France:

If the British Government had any gumption, however, it wouldn’t just let them leave. It would pay them to go to Calais and warn wannabe migrants about how wretched life in Britain is – so that they don’t come here in the first place. Supply the ex-migrants with loudhailers, so they can march up and down French beaches, bellowing: “Don’t board that dinghy! It’s not worth it! Britain is skint, miserable and falling apart! And the people-smugglers will charge even more to get you out than they’re charging to get you in! Please, take it from us – you’re much better off staying in France!”

However, even that has its downside:

It’s got to be worth trying. Then again, the plan does have one possible downside. If word gets out that we’re paying these former migrants good money to deter aspiring migrants, the aspiring migrants will be even keener to come – so that we’ll pay them to do the same thing. Thousands upon thousands of penniless people will come pouring into Britain, in the hope of being kicked straight out again.

The Mail‘s intrepid veteran reporter Sue Reid actually interviewed some of the young migrants. I don’t know how she does it. I’ve seen her interviewed several times on GB News, and she still has bags of energy.

Excerpts follow from ‘SUE REID: The migrants trying to sneak BACK across the Channel who say coming to Britain was the worst decision they’ve ever made’:

… The Mail discovered the phenomenon of disgruntled migrants quitting Britain earlier this month when we were approached by Alaa Eldin, 25 — a Syrian squatting under an upturned rowing boat on Dover beach.

He told us: ‘I am trapped in your country. I have been trying to get on a lorry for five months. The police spot me and bring me back to Dover. They won’t let me go.’

Last week, Alaa decamped to the former bomb shelter in the White Cliffs, which he proudly showed us round.

It has a store of groceries, duvets and outside are the remnants of a campfire.

‘I stay here. There are a few of us, sometimes 20. We all want to leave and some are now in France after hiding on lorries already,’ he said. Alaa claimed asylum after arriving on a traffickers’ boat in August 2021.

He was one of more than 28,000 migrants to cross the Channel to Dover that year. He had come from Germany, where he has family who have settled there from war-torn Syria.

On arrival, he was dispatched to a migrants’ hotel, the Britannia, in Leeds. But he broke the Home Office asylum rules when he left the accommodation for a week to try to earn money on the black market.

Thrown out of the asylum system as a punishment for illegally trying to work, he headed for Dover, the only place he knew in Britain and where he gets a daily shower at the nearby Outreach centre for the homeless.

Reid then told us about a draft-dodger:

… it was not hard in Kent to find asylum seekers who are fed up to the back teeth with Britain.

As it turned dark on Tuesday evening last week, a lone figure stood outside the Outreach centre wearing a hoodie and zipped-up jumper. This was an Eritrean Christian named Abel.

He told a distressing tale of how, aged 14, he had fled Eritrea — a ruthless dictatorship in East Africa, where every male must join the military at 18 …

Although Abel was granted asylum years ago, and even has a National Insurance card, meaning he can work, he has frequently found himself homeless …

‘I talk to my mother on my mobile, and she weeps at what has become of me. I would like to go home to her and my nine brothers and sisters.’

Yes, well, as the American Thomas Wolfe entitled his novel published posthumously in 1940, You Can’t Go Home Again, and that was about professional success:

‘But Eritrea is a difficult country,’ counters Abel, who speaks English well and for three years studied to be a mechanic at a Dover college. ‘I do want to leave Britain, but it would be hard to go back to my homeland now.’

There used to be a time when the world’s migrants realised that. That was the case with my 19th century ancestors and millions of others. You left family behind. It was a difficult decision — and a permanent one.

The next story shows how the smuggling network operates. Angers, referenced below, is a lovely, historic medium-sized city in France:

… Mohammed Boumatta, the weeping 17-year-old, is certain what he wants to do. In Dover, hundreds of lorries each week park and queue to join ferries for France. He is determined to stow away on one.

His asylum papers show the Home Office deem him to be a Moroccan citizen, although he comes from Laayoune, the dusty capital of Western Sahara, a disputed territory on the North-Western coast of Africa.

His father is a goat-herder there, while his 25-year-old brother, Otmane, lives in Angers, western France, where he is a mechanic.

It was to stay with his brother that Mohammed set off a couple of years ago, paying for a traffickers’ boat ride to the Canary Islands, now a hotspot for migrants fleeing Africa.

At first, all went well. He was sent as an unaccompanied young migrant to mainland Spain by the government in Madrid. From there, he made his way to France to live with his brother.

The French put him in school and paid him £600 a month as a living allowance.

What was there not to like? ‘I was learning to speak French properly. I was soon speaking the language really well,’ he admits now, remorse written on his face.

No kidding. Morocco was a former French colony.

The story continues:

But somehow, while he was in Angers he fell in with a trafficking agent, who told him Britain was a better country.

‘The agent told me that, as an asylum seeker, I would get an English education, a house, and more money still,’ says Mohammed. ‘I borrowed the £1,000 for the trafficking agent from a friend of my brother’s.’

After getting off the boat in Dover, he was sent to a migrants’ hotel in Liverpool and then to a Home Office multi-occupation house in Hindley near Wigan [north west England].

‘The men there were much older than me. I felt unsafe. I decided to leave to go back to France across the Channel. I already hated Britain,’ he says.

After his attempt to reach France ended at London City Airport, he was marooned. His asylum claim is up in the air.

‘No one at the Home Office has come looking for me,’ he explains over a plate of spaghetti at a Dover cafe. ‘I don’t think they care that I am missing.’

During his terrifying lorry journey across England, he lay on the axle between the vehicle’s wheels. The driver mysteriously headed to City Airport via Felixstowe, the East Anglian container port, but didn’t stop there.

‘My body was inches from the ground the whole journey. I could have lost an arm, a leg or my life. I think the driver was lost.’

Now Mohammed is back living rough at the dingy port. Does he still want to escape Britain?

‘Yes,’ comes the quick reply. ‘I will try every night — anything to get away from your country.

‘Coming to Britain was the biggest mistake of my life.’

I hope he succeeds.

This statement, sandwiched in Abel’s story, puzzled me, given Reid’s interviews:

The Home Office has a voluntary returns system, where migrants who don’t want to stay are given a flight back to their home country with £3,000 of taxpayers’ money on a credit card in their pocket.

How can that be when the police are preventing migrants from leaving? Yet another bureaucratic Government mystery.

Let these men go.