The death total since the beginning of June stands at nine as the continual assaults on the terminal continue relentlessly, police have had to resort to shoving huge swathes, up to 1,000 individuals, away from the Eurotunnel facility according to eye witnesses. In addition, landlords who fail to check the immigration status of tenants could be fined or imprisoned for up to five years.
Advertisement
“Either way, their figures identify a transient migrant population”.
Cameron said Britain and other European nations faced a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life”.
There is also controversy over the cost to taxpayers of housing migrants who have arrived through the Channel Tunnel, after contractors Serco confirmed that around 100 were being accommodated in hotels.
“We will also require them to meet their basic responsibilities as landlords, cracking down on those who rent out unsafe, dirty and overcrowded properties”. At present they are entitled to be housed and claim £36.95 a week.
The French government, with the support of many NGOs, is providing humanitarian aid and support to the migrants in Calais.
Despite significant deployments of riot police, security equipment, and sniffer dogs thousands of desperate attempts to break into the Calais port facilities are still made every night.
Indeed one leading conservative Gaullist, Xavier Bertrand, suggested at the weekend that if Britain did not agree to start processing the asylum seekers, France should simply let them loose to try to breach the border.
However, in a sign of the political anger on the ground, a French Opposition legislator accused British PM David Cameron of failing to grasp the severity of the problem.
A police source said Tuesday some 500 migrants were seen overnight next to the Channel Tunnel site near Calais.
While the Government have promised to beef up blockades, Eurotunnel bosses have warned other entry points to England could soon see an influx of migrants.
“They want to go to England to find a job because they know it is possible to work without an identity card”.
The government’s increasingly shrill tone has upset charities, churchmen and left-wing politicians, while anti-EU campaigners have seized on the crisis as proof that Britain is unable to protect its own borders while remaining in the bloc.
Last year Sweden accepted 30,000 asylum seekers compared to the UK’s 10,000.
Advertisement
“There are no easy solutions – and it is not for the UK and France to solve these problems alone”, British interior minister Theresa May and her French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve said in a joint letter published in the Sunday Telegraph and the Le Journal Du Dimanche newspapers.
