It is shocking to imagine that in December, as many of us in the UK enjoyed the festive season with family and friends, around 84 people, who have fled their homes, climbed into small boats and attempted to make the perilous journey across the busy shipping lanes of the English Channel.
There has been much political debate about the situation in recent days, seeking to understand why it is happening and what can be done about it.
As the UK’s largest independent provider of support to refugees and people seeking asylum, helping over 30,000 individuals last year, the British Red Cross has a unique insight into the reasons people feel compelled to risk their lives in an attempt to reach our country. For many, it will be because they have close family members in the UK who they long to be reunited with. For others it may be because they already speak English or because they are desperate to escape the harsh conditions that come with sleeping rough in Northern France.
We don’t know the individual reasons why people may have attempted the journey, however, it does appear that most are Iranian nationals. Our authorities regularly grant asylum to people from Iran recognising that they may be subject to religious persecution, domestic abuse or a lack of free movement.
So what is new is the way people are arriving. We know that asylum systems in different countries vary in their effectiveness and approach to family reunion. This may be causing some people to lack trust in the system and feel they have no choice but to put their lives into the hands of people smugglers who are offering increasingly dangerous journeys at increasingly high prices.
It is important to keep the numbers in perspective – reports suggest that in the whole of last year, 312 people successfully reached the UK in this way. To give a sense of scale, this is only 0.04% of the 856,723 migrants who reached Greece by sea in 2015, according to UN figures. And again of the 68.5million people in the world who have been forcibly displaced from their homelands due to war, violence and persecution, 85% of all refugees are hosted by neighbouring countries and will never travel near Europe at all.
But whether it’s crossing the Mediterranean, traversing the Sahara, or – in very rare cases – getting into a dinghy to cross the Channel, the decision to leave the place you call home is never taken lightly. For some, their journeys can be tragically fatal, with 2,242 people known to have lost their lives in the Mediterranean last year, taking the total to more than 10,000 lives lost in that sea alone since the beginning of 2016. Even one person risking their life to reach safety is one too many.
The Home Secretary is right when he says there are no easy answers with regards to people making dangerous journeys across the Channel. But what is simple is that our response as a country must protect human life and dignity, improve information at each stage of the journey, provide for basic humanitarian needs and enable access to fair legal procedures such as asylum claims.
Our Government could also provide alternative safe and legal routes to the UK to reduce the risk of trafficking and prevent loss of life. One such route is family reunion, whereby people already granted refugee status in the UK can be joined by their close family members. The British Red Cross is one of many organisations that has been calling for a widening of existing family reunion rules for some time.
Last year, British Red Cross helped around 3,000 people to reunite with their loved ones in the UK. This first week in 2019 alone we have reunited eight more families, including nine children. We are witness to the joy and relief that being with family after months, often years, apart brings.
As part of the world’s largest independent humanitarian network, we will continue to stand ready to give new arrivals the welcome and the support they need and deserve.
Mike Adamson is the chief executive of British Red Cross