France sees migrant deaths in the Channel as a problem caused by Britain

The French rescuers packed their gear with well-rehearsed efficiency. The medical tents. The stretchers. The safety cordons.

Shortly after the last bodies had been driven off the quayside in Boulogne, the remaining ambulances and red emergency vehicles drove away. Only a handful of civil servants remained standing in the half-light, next to a few worn fishing nets by the harbour wall.

“It’s so disturbing,” said Frederic Cuvillier, mayor of Boulogne, reflecting on the way this long, ever-evolving migrant crisis has shaped and traumatized France’s northern coast.

Twelve people died on Tuesday when a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank off the coast of the English Channel, including six children and a pregnant woman.

“These people are fleeing death and dying here. Mothers, children… convinced that they will find a better life on the other side of the Channel,” said Cuvillier, pointing west towards a grey sea.

Immediately after incidents like this – I’ve experienced several of them this year – there is a growing divide between the way the French and the British respond.

In the UK, officials have been quick to target – and condemn – the smuggling gangs. Every incident, every death, is seen as the result of cynical criminal activity. Which of course it is.

Once again, the smugglers crammed far too many paying customers into increasingly rickety boats, without enough life jackets.

Here in northern France, the police have a similar focus. They are preoccupied with the task of patrolling ever larger stretches of their increasingly militarised coastline. They now have more manpower, buggies, night vision equipment and special drones that can detect groups of migrants hiding in the dunes.

However, police are aware that as smuggling gangs expand their operations – now largely funded by British taxpayers – they are responding by finding new ways to cross the border, often putting the migrants themselves at ever greater risk.

The gangs now launch their boats inland, from canals or all the way along the French coast, meaning they face much longer journeys to cross a busy stretch of water, full of commercial vessels and with powerful tides.

The gangs are cramming more and more people into inflatable boats of increasingly dubious quality – sometimes 90 people into a boat designed, or barely designed, to carry 40. The problem is compounded as authorities succeed in disrupting the supply of boats brought to the coastline from deep in Europe.

And increasingly, the smugglers are also using violence. Stones thrown at the police on the beaches. Sometimes knives are also brandished.

Recently I was shown footage from the police at a local gendarmerie of what looked like another battle on a beach at dawn, with riot police defending themselves against a hail of stones. I myself witnessed another battle in April.

The smugglers want to gain a few precious seconds to get their boats and passengers into the water. The police, afraid that they will be blamed for exposing people to even greater dangers, rarely intervene.

But while the police are carrying out their duties and facing dangers, French politicians and citizens in the seaside resorts along the coastline are focusing not so much on the criminality of the smugglers in this latest deadly incident, but on the motives of the migrants, on what still drives them to risk this dangerous crossing.

And the blunt conclusion, which has been put to me so often – by local mayors, by pensioners, by couples who walked their dogs on the beach and now fear they will find bodies washed up on the beach – is that this is Britain’s fault.

Many French people have seen the crisis unfold over decades, from the Channel Tunnel camps and ferry ports to the more recent phenomenon of small boats, and are deeply indignant at the way their own lives and communities have been transformed by a crisis they see as one of British origin.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin spoke about it on Tuesday in the port of Boulogne.

He condemned the smugglers, but most of the comments focused on the lure of what he sees as Britain’s loosely regulated labour market, which acts like a magnet for young Eritreans, determined Sudanese, Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis, convinced that if they cross the last stretch of water – or even halfway – they will find themselves in a country where they can find work, even without the right papers.

Darmanin, as he has done before, called for a new migrant treaty between Britain and the European Union.

In doing so, he touched on a widespread belief in France that no matter how much effort is put into tackling the smuggling gangs, it will never be enough. That this is a crisis fueled by the demands of tens of thousands of determined migrants, rather than the profit-seeking of a loose network of criminals.

And there is another difference between the way Britain and France react at such moments. You see it in the headlines and on television.

The small boat crisis may be big news in the UK, but in France, a country currently reeling from political unrest and, frankly, tired of the situation on its north coast, even twelve deaths in the Channel barely makes headlines.