What is the real story behind Vietnamese Channel boat crossings?

The people from Vietnam trying to get to England on small boats across the Channel stand out from the rest of those drawn to the Pas-de-Calais coastline.

They are notably young, many just teenagers. They tend to stick together and eschew the attention of the aid workers offering food and water down at the beach or in the forests where they sleep at night.

They appear nervous, under pressure, but their smart dress means they could easily be mistaken for tourists, charity volunteers say. They seem to have money, too.

“When the police block them from getting on the boats, we have had some people from Vietnam ask how to get a taxi back to where they are staying,” said Sophie Roux, 32, a volunteer with the Osmose 62 charity. “We say it might be €200 [£170] and they say it isn’t a problem.”

A new group of about 200 people from Vietnam, about half of them women, had arrived in the area on Monday, with scores of them hoping to be on a dinghy going across the Channel at first light the next day.

Their handlers had to turn them back at the beach in the immediate aftermath of the latest horror on the coast: five people, including a six-year-old girl said to be from Iraq or Kuwait, died on the shoreline near Wimereux, a quiet town 20 miles south of Calais. They would try again when the weather cleared, they said.

This week, when trailing his intention to plough on with his policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, Rishi Sunak noted Vietnamese arrivals.

The trafficking gangs, the prime minister claimed, had “shifted their attentions towards vulnerable Vietnamese migrants”.

“Vietnamese arrivals have increased tenfold”, he said, adding that they “account for almost all of the increase in small-boat numbers we have seen this year”.

The prime minister’s inference was that this new trend proved the small boats were first and foremost a response to demand from “economic migrants”.

The plan to deport to Rwanda those arriving on small boats could not therefore be viewed as a challenge to Britain’s record on asylum.

It is not quite what seasoned observers see – nor what they believe is a general solution to the ongoing horror unfolding on the northern French coastline. “The Vietnamese are very different,” Roux said.

There has been a tenfold increase in the number of Vietnamese people found on the boats between 1 January and 21 April compared with the same period last year. The figures show they made up one in five (1,266) of the 6,265 recorded arrivals. There were 1,216 people from Afghanistan in the same period.

Step a little further back, and the five most common departure countries in 2023 of those detected crossing the Channel were: Afghanistan, 5,545 (20% of the total), Iran, 3,562 (13%), Turkey, 3,040 (11%), Eritrea, 2,662 (9%) and Iraq, 2,545 (9%).

The stories of those waiting in the forest by a motorway on the outskirts of Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk, are predominantly of those seeking to escape violence and repression.

Regarding the rise this year in the number of Vietnamese crossing the Channel, Mimi Vu, an anti-trafficking and modern slavery expert based in Ho Chi Minh City, suggested policymakers should look at the bigger picture.

“This is not some new surge of interest in Vietnamese people to coming to Britain but an ongoing migration trend,” Vu said.

Traffickers had begun using boats rather than the back of trucks to move people into England at the start of 2024 after surveillance and policing at ports were tightened. This may be interesting fact, but not the basis on which to build policy, said James Fookes, the UK and Europe advocacy manager at Anti-Slavery International.

“There is a well-established trafficking and smuggling route from Vietnam to the UK, and Vietnamese nationals are highly represented in the Home Office’s trafficking statistics,” he said.

“The statistics on nationality in relation to people making dangerous journeys to the UK are a distraction that drives our attention away from the important fact that we are failing survivors.

“We know that traffickers maintain knowledge of rules of the countries they are operating in and will find ways to use these to their advantage, changing routes as laws and circumstances change.”

It might well be that those waiting in Dunkirk and Calais for their chance to reach the UK were initially driven by the hope of a better life, but Fookes said it was likely they were now trapped.

The trial last year of 19 people accused of being responsible for the deaths by suffocation of 39 Vietnamese people as they were transported across the Channel in an airtight container offered an insight into the longstanding practices of human trafficking gangs.

When families began to send their young people to the west to seek better lives and to wire back money, unscrupulous employment agents stepped in to provide work visas – and to put their clients on a path to exploitation.

They would charge tens of thousands of pounds for fixing low-skilled work in factories or in the fields in Romania, Poland and elsewhere.

When the wages were too low to pay off the debt, or when the visas ran out, the only solution was to be moved to the UK to work in nail salons or the sex industry.

Vu, who recently completed a report for the International Organisation for Migration on the trafficking of people from Vietnam, said teenagers had been moved into Europe through visas issued by the Maltese consulate in Shanghai for English language schools in Malta. Of the 265 Vietnamese students to have been given visas to study at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology since 2021, only two had returned home. The college denies any knowledge of abuse of its courses.

The trafficking industry faced two challenges recently: the Covid pandemic, for obvious reasons, and the war in Ukraine, which had made Russian tourists visas – once handed out liberally and exploited – less useful. But the demand stayed the same and new ways in had been found, Vu said.

“The so-called surge or change in patterns we might see now is not due to changes happening now,” she said. “It can take months, even years, to get from Vietnam to the UK.”

Vu added of those in Pas-de-Calais: “The money that the Vietnamese have for taxis won’t be theirs it will be from the traffickers. It’s a crapshoot whether you get on the boat and this is a business wholly driven by profit.”