The
Kent coast is littered with old gibbet sites. During the Napoleonic
wars, the cages that were used to display the decomposing corpses of
executed criminals were common around popular smuggling haunts, gruesome
reminders of the fate that would befall those who engaged in what they
called “the free trade”.
Today a rather more modern form of smuggling is operating along the
coast of south-east England and it is casting a shadow over Britain’s
security, its economy and perhaps even its continued membership of the
EU. This time, however, the bounty fetching up on Britain’s shoreline is
not French brandy but migrants and, in particular, Albanian nationals.
That Albanians now comprise one of the largest groups of illegal
immigrants to the UK appears to have caught politicians and police
forces by surprise. The former communist bloc country, home to just six
million people, was once viewed as an insular, east European backwater.
But figures shared with the
Observer by Barnardo’s reveal that
the number of Albanian children being helped by its specialist
trafficking support teams is now second only to those from Vietnam.
Each month exposes a new smuggling operation involving men, women and children from Albania. Last weekend,
18 Albanians were saved off the coast of Dymchurch in Kent when their inflatable boat started to sink. A fortnight before,
17 Albanian migrants were picked up in Chichester marina in West Sussex, having crossed the Channel in a catamaran.
According to Europol, the pan-European police agency, the UK’s
smaller ports, marinas and beaches are becoming attractive to gangs
bringing in illegal migrants. Last week, the agency identified a dozen
of these smuggling “hotspots” around the English coast, including Orford
Ness in Suffolk, Tilbury in Essex, Newhaven in East Sussex and
Whitstable in Kent.
The National Crime Agency believes hundreds of criminals in Britain
are now involved in the trade. It estimates that migrants can pay as
little as £100 for a “single attempt through unsophisticated means” from
France to the UK. A “high-quality” journey can cost more than £6,000.
But locals who live near the hotspots report that what is happening is
not new. Simon Moores, an IT expert, was out in a kayak near Margate on
the north-east Kent coast in about 2005 when he saw a lone man swimming
ashore, fully dressed.
“I paddled quickly alongside and asked if I could help. ‘No, no,’ he
replied, ‘It’s a nice day and I am swimming.’ He was an Arab and, from
years in the Middle East, I’m guessing an Iraqi. I stayed with him, all
the way to the steps on to the promenade. He climbed them in a
squelching pair of white Nikes and promptly disappeared.” Later, police
told Moores that there had been a spate of boats dropping migrants off
Margate.
The difference between then and now is that today’s smuggling
operations are more technologically savvy, Moores believes. He points
out that GPS phone technology allows people smugglers on the shore to
co-ordinate with those on the boats. “Migrant trafficking’s Uber moment
has arrived, thanks to smartphone technology,” Moores said.
A Dymchurch businessman told the
Daily Mirror:
“This is happening here. It’s real. Just a few weeks ago, I handed the
Border Agency CCTV footage of six migrants walking along the slipway
after getting off a boat. They jumped in a waiting van and then they
were off.”
While Dymchurch, on the Romney Marsh, has hit the headlines, the
longer beaches of Walmer and Deal, north of Dover, are thought to be
more popular with the smugglers. Border Agency officials suspect that a
large fishing boat is being used to transport illegal migrants out of
Belgian ports, where security is more lax than in France. Once at sea,
the boat transfers its passengers to smaller inflatables which can,
under cover of darkness, speed into shore undetected by a coastguard
struggling against funding cuts.
“We’re reaching crisis point and now is not the time to start
cutting, but that’s what the home secretary has been doing,” said Martyn
Underhill, police and crime commissioner for Dorset.
Moores used to be a Conservative councillor in North Thanet, which
has a sizable immigrant population. “Local people believe that these
people have taken their jobs,” he says. “It’s a perception more than
anything else, but it’s the perception that counts from a political
point of view.”
Neighbouring Thanet South is the constituency Ukip leader Nigel
Farage narrowly failed to win at the last election. “No one here is
voting to stay in,” Moores said. “The referendum is a catalyst. People
see
Europe as culpable in their problems. This is their chance to express how they feel.”
Regular stories about the arrival of illegal Albanian immigrants –
which are heavily promoted by pro-Brexit politicians and newspapers –
will not woo the undecided to the Remain cause. Rather, they highlight
the tensions that come with integration: the apparent increase in the
number of Albanians entering the UK can be traced back to December 2010,
when the EU relaxed laws allowing them to travel throughout the
Schengen area without a visa.
The hope at the time,
as expressed by Baroness Ludford,
a Liberal Democrat peer, was that “fostering the links between the
western Balkans and the European Union will reduce the potential for our
south-eastern neighbours to revert to nationalism, conflict and ethnic
hatred, making them and us safer as a result”.
The
latest report from European border agency Frontex
highlights the unintended consequence: record numbers of Albanians
being stopped at EU airports as they seek to reach non-Schengen
countries. “This predominance of Albanians in the data on refusals of
entry coincides with the visa liberalisation regime that entered into
force in 2011 for Albanians,” says the report. It adds: “The number of
persons aiming to get to the UK with fraudulent documents significantly
increased (+70%) compared with 2014. This trend is mostly attributable
to the increasing number of Albanian nationals misusing Italian and
Greek ID cards.”
Officially, the UK is home to around 20,000 Albanians. But more are
known to have entered, having pretended to be Kosovans fleeing the war
in Yugoslavia. The UK is the ultimate destination for younger Albanians,
who come from a country where 70% of the population is Muslim and the
medieval code of
kanun holds sway in rural areas. This decrees
that spilled blood must be paid for with spilled blood, a stipulation
that, down the years, has resulted in hundreds of tit-for-tat murders.
The blood feuds are recognised by the European Commission, as one of the most common “push factors” driving asylum flows from
Albania, along with “deprivation, unemployment, discrimination and poor access to healthcare, social benefits and education”.
Albanians claiming asylum in the UK regularly cite the feuds as their
reason for being unable to return home. In 2008, there were 173
applications for asylum in the UK from Albanian nationals. By last year
the figure had risen to 1,809. Nearly all requests are rejected. This is
to the advantage of the Albanian mafia which, according to a
report
by the Research Institute for European and American Studies, has used
its dominant position in the European heroin trade to diversify. “This
highly sophisticated criminal network has been able to control much of
the drugs trade in Europe and also the trafficking of women and children
from the Balkans to western Europe. Both of these activities are
complementary to each other and frequently criminal groups switch from
one activity to the other.”
Agon, an 18-year-old Albanian, being cared for by Barnardo’s, was
trafficked from Spain to the UK: “My father had a problem with the mafia
in Albania. The mafia wanted my father to pay some money but he didn’t
have the money so they tried to shoot him. I was scared for my life, so
this is why I left Albania. I left my family behind and went to Spain to
start a new life. I met someone in Spain who knew about a group of
Albanians that help people get to the UK.
“You have to pay them a lot of money, around £6,000. If you don’t
have the money, you can pay them back by working for them once you’re in
the UK. The traffickers told me I can have a better life in the UK. I
believed them.”
So, it is becoming apparent, do many others.
