In a rain-sodden stretch of wasteland on the edge of Dunkirk, the groups of people waiting for small boats to try and reach Britain from the northern French coast have thinned in recent days.
Inclement weather, which has brought snow and choppy seas, has proved a deterrent for the regular crossings. But Britain’s newest legislative push to crack down on boat crossings and restrict asylum applications has not.
“What else can I do?” said 26-year-old Afghan Usman, who like roughly 300 others taking cover under trees and makeshift tents in the area, is waiting for the next departure from nearby beaches. “I’m not coming for the money but to save my life.”
A former fighter in the Afghan army, he said he had fled his village two years ago when the Taliban returned. His attempt to settle in Turkey was cut short by deportation; a three-month journey, largely on foot, has led him to this last staging post on the way to Britain, where his family had recommended he might find refuge.
But his chances, and those of others huddling in the shrubbery outside the factories and oil depots on the outskirts of Dunkirk, will be even more remote if UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s new illegal migration bill is passed.
The legislation, which still needs to be approved in parliament, is the most drastic migration clampdown yet under the Conservative government, and part of a drive to stem the number of small boat crossings to Britain that have also led to deadly accidents.
It bars people considered to have entered Britain illegally from claiming asylum, a measure that even Tory ministers have conceded had a high chance of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights, and which has drawn an outcry from the opposition Labour party, human rights campaigners and the UN refugee agency.
The bill would also bar people who are deemed to have arrived illegally from making future asylum claims, and expose them to deportation to their country of origin, or a third party country willing to accept them.
How this might be enacted is still unclear. Last year, Britain agreed a controversial deal with Rwanda aimed at transferring some asylum seekers but this has been stalled by legal challenges.
Since Brexit, the UK is no longer part of the Dublin Regulation, an agreement among European states that allows for some asylum seekers to be sent back to the country through which they first arrive.
Currently, Britain has no agreement for returning migrants to France, and little prospect of clinching one, with Paris insisting that one would have to be negotiated with the EU as a whole.
“There’s not going to be one [a readmission agreement] tomorrow either as this law is essentially saying that anyone who enters illegally into Britain cannot stay,” said a French official, even as French president Emmanuel Macron and Sunak met on Friday as part of a broader reset of ties that have turned frosty since Brexit.
If the bill was intended to dissuade those journeying across the Channel, it has yet to hit its mark on the stretch of French coast closest to British shores — at about 20 miles or 32 kilometres at its narrowest point — despite it applying retroactively to anyone making the crossing since March 7.
“It’s creating a lot of anxiety. But that doesn’t mean people are not going to take the boat,” said Augustin Beau, a volunteer for Utopia 56, a humanitarian group.
Outside Dunkirk, in an area known as Mardyck, French police regularly come to clear away tents dotted across fields and woodland only for them to pop up again. Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqi Kurds and Eritreans are among those often seen at the site. Migrants from India have also begun to arrive in greater numbers. Closer to Calais, Syrian encampments can be found.
When the seas are calmer and people smugglers send word of more departures, the ad hoc camp at Mardyck tends to swell, with several more hundred people and women and families passing through, volunteers said.
Arrivals in recent days included an unaccompanied 11-year-old Afghan boy who seemingly made it to France on foot, and was still determined to join his brother in Britain, Beau said.
“When you’ve done a journey such as that, it’s not the threat of a potential law that’s going to stop someone from trying to cross,” Beau added, who works with volunteers who try to prevent deaths by briefing people on how to call for help at sea.
Heightened patrols by French police, including under a revised migration agreement with Britain from November with a bigger budget, had done little to stem crossings so far, humanitarian groups said, but had shifted them to parts of the coast where the distance to the UK was greater or even to Belgium.
The British government has said that 31,000 crossings were prevented from France in 2022, even though the number of people journeying across the Channel reached 46,000, up 60 per cent from a year earlier.
Deaths and accidents have continued to rise since a rubber dinghy capsized in November 2021 and at least 27 people were killed, sparking shock on both sides of the Channel.
The French government has also argued that Britain needs to create better legal avenues for migration to tackle the arrival of undocumented migrants.
Britain receives fewer asylum requests than many other countries in the EU, including the just over 137,000 registered in France last year. But UK asylum requests rose to close to 75,000 in 2022, the highest level since a 2002 peak, according to Home Office figures.
On the French coast, some deflected questions over the crossings and what awaited in Britain under a tougher asylum regime with humour, including Usman.
“I’d like to take the aeroplane, if I could get a visa,” he smiled.
For now, however, Ali Nasser, a 39-year-old from Pakistan, said he would still pursue what he described as a “suicide mission” across the sea.
Another migrant, Khiyal Gul of Afghanistan, said he would also now turn to the boats after two unsuccessful attempts to reach the UK by truck, through the Channel Tunnel. The sailings were now a cheaper option at roughly €2,000 a passage, after carriers using lorries had increased their prices to about €5,000, he said.
“How can I apply legally? We don’t have enough money so we have to do it the other way,” Nasser said. “If they have any humanity left they will accept us.”
Additional reporting by Leila Abboud and Domitille Alain in Paris