At 11am yesterday, the Border Force vessel Ranger drew into the Kent port of Dover carrying 64 migrants.
After leaving from a Dunkirk beach, the migrants had been plucked from their rubber boat mid-Channel by the French navy, before being handed over to the British ship.
It’s the sort of incident that has become an almost daily event, as the influx of asylum seekers into the UK continues virtually unchecked.
But one of the people who boarded Ranger will go down in history as the 200,000th migrant to officially reach these shores by small boat since records began in 2018.
Using the Government’s own figures, the Daily Mail calculated that the arrival of just 57 more migrants yesterday would take us to the controversial 200,000 mark.
In the photograph above, we have circled the young man who we believe to be Migrant No. 200,000.
He will hail from a Third World country, have a pitiful story of hardship to tell and claim asylum because of it.
His case is likely to take years to work its way through the immigration system and the likelihood he will ever leave, either voluntarily or via deportation, is close to zero.
Historic figure: Among the people brought ashore by Border Control yesterday is the man believed to be the 200,000th small-boat migrant, circled
By letting him in, and the tens of thousands before him, Britain has committed a grotesque act of self-harm.
I have reported on the abuse of our open sea borders by illegal migrants for 25 years. It’s a phenomenon that has made us a laughing stock in the eyes of the world, as well as endangering the well-being of our own citizens by putting our public services under intolerable pressure.
Migrant No. 200,000 will have woken up this morning at Manston processing centre in Kent, where all illegal boat arrivals are sent for up to 72 hours for an initial interview by Border Force officials.
They will ask for his name, age and nationality, but there is no guarantee he will answer truthfully.
Over this weekend, No. 200,000 will leave Manston and be sent by coach to a Home Office hotel, where he will live for free – with a £49-a-month handout – for weeks, perhaps months, maybe years.
This extraordinary scenario was unimaginable as little as ten years ago. Yes, migrants were hiding in lorries on ferries from France as Britain first became an easy target for mass illegal immigration at the turn of the century.
But in 2016 things changed for the worse. Discarded rubber boats started appearing on the beaches of Kent and East Sussex.
It was the same story in 2017, the year I began investigating what I suspected was a new illegal means of reaching the UK: small boats.
During 2018, 299 migrants arrived on traffickers’ boats from Calais. The first pictures of them showed a group of men, wrapped in blankets, on Kent sand dunes, the flimsy boat that had taken them 21 miles across the sea lying among the rocks in the shallows.
It was hard not to feel sympathy for them. But soon the trickle of individual boats morphed into a military-style operation run by ruthless people traffickers.
Vessels made in China, and shipped to European hideouts, got bigger and bigger. Today they carry not five or six people apiece, as in 2018, but 60 or 70.
The Tory government turned a blind eye. My warnings published in the Daily Mail, that what had been an occasional boat run out of Calais by a few migrants had become a daily armada, were ignored.
In late 2018, I even hired a rubber boat myself. With the help of a skipper, I travelled in it from Gravelines, northern France, to Dover without a passport to highlight the growing scandal – and danger – of our open borders.
Since Labour came to power in July 2024 more than 70,000 people have reached the south coast by small boat, and many more will follow Migrant No. 200,000 unless something is done to stop them – and fast.
In late 2024, I appeared in a two-part BBC documentary that examined the issue of open borders.
I was invited on the programme because I had met, and interviewed, 500 migrants as far afield as northern France, Turkey and the Greek Islands, as they plotted their way to Britain.
Appearing with me were former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron, and a clutch of ex-Home Secretaries.
They were all, to some degree, architects of our fatally flawed migration policy. But confronted about the perils of open borders by the BBC, they either avoided the question, or gave a passive response. None apologised.
I, alone, told the truth: ‘A country without borders is not really a country at all. It is just a piece of land containing anyone who wishes to come and live there.’
If we take the boat migrants alone, the tally of 200,000 arrivals – a number that roughly equates to the population of Bournemouth or Norwich – is almost too fantastical to comprehend.
It is not cruel to say enough is enough. I have met genuine refugees, many of them distressed families with children, as they try to reach Britain.
They are now among the victims of this free-for-all: elbowed aside by young, invariably male, economic migrants, who can afford to pay traffickers to get priority access to boats in France and Belgium.
And once here, they are often a source of social upheaval. Every day, desperate people in Britain send me videos of street violence, predatory sexual behaviour against women and girls, and general yobbish behaviour by some of the tens of thousands of illegals, from alien cultures and religions, who we have allowed to enter our country.
The British public’s position on uncontrolled borders has been stated clearly, and repeatedly, for two decades now.
There was no clearer display of this discontent than at the ballot box yesterday when Nigel Farage’s anti-migration Reform UK party stormed to success in the local elections.
Yet the British asylum system, which costs no less than £4.7 billion a year, continues to grow thanks to the clamorous support of opportunistic charities, greedy immigration lawyers and Left-wing politicians.
Migrant No. 200,000 is, of course, not personally to blame. By Monday, he will be in a warm hotel room, expecting that soon he will get a house, free medical care and a steady stream of benefits. In short, everything the gangs in France promised in order to lure him to buy a £4,000 ticket to ride.
He will also have ready his backstory of oppression and persecution, carefully choreographed with help from charity workers in France, to assist his asylum claim.
If he is from deeply homophobic Uganda, he will pose as gay. If he is Iranian, he will say he is a Christian convert suffering terribly under a ruthless Islamic regime.
Or if an Eritrean, his story will be that the appalling military dictatorship at home meant he faced lifelong servitude in the army.
Whatever his plight, there must come a time when we harden our hearts to save ourselves.
The answer to him, and any other bogus boat migrants asking for asylum, has to be a steadfast ‘No’.
