First to the things that seem to interest few: The first victim of the shipwreck in the English Channel has been identified. It is about 24-year-old Mariam Nouri Hamadameen, a Kurdish woman from Northern Iraq. She was on the way to see her fiancé, who lives in England. Hamadameen entered Italy on a visa. Her attempts to legally get on to Great Britain had failed, she paid a smuggler. When the inflatable raft started to fill up with water, Hamadameen wrote her fiancé a message on Snapchat. They would surely be saved soon. Shortly afterwards, he could no longer locate the GPS signal on her cell phone. Hamadameen and at least 27 others drowned.
The governments in Paris and London have so far primarily found an answer to the deaths of these people: They blame the smugglers and each other. The fact that there are hardly any other ways to get to Great Britain in order to apply for asylum there is hardly an option.
London, Paris and thus also the EU have done everything to turn the northern French port city of Calais into a place that enables goods to be exchanged as quickly as possible. And which stops migrants and refugees very efficiently. However, asylum in Great Britain can only be applied for by those who reach mainland Britain. With this practice, London wants to keep the Brexit promise: We are an island that has the right and the power to seal itself off.
President Emmanuel Macron is under pressure from right-wing and conservatives
But in reality it is the case that London can only seal itself off with the help of the French. France protects the British coast on the English Channel. This is what the Touquet Treaty stipulates, which was signed at a time when the British still considered the EU to be a future project. London now wants to adhere to Touquet’s regulation in a very idiosyncratic way: it insults the French for not adequately controlling the beaches and demands to be allowed to send police officers to the coast themselves. A proposal that France understandably rejects. At the same time, French President Emmanuel Macron has long been pressured by right-wing parties and conservatives to stop working with the British. Migrants want out of France, out of the EU? Go ahead, it’s Dover over there, have a good trip.
Both sides are working behind the scenes to ensure that such a scandal does not occur. France is also not interested in an open border towards England, which would become a point of contact for migrants. And London can hardly afford to lose France’s willingness to cooperate. Unless, as some have already whispered, the British government actually follows the example of Australia and deportes arriving refugees directly to camps outside the country.
But apparently one does not want to bother voters with such facts. Communication between London and Paris shows what happens when populists come to power or, in the case of France, the opposition dominates. Migration policy issues are then, on the one hand, declared to be a country’s greatest problem. At the same time, the national-chauvinist rhetoric of Boris Johnson makes them less and less solvable.
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