Four People Died in the Channel in a Single Night, in Two Separate Attempts

French authorities reported four deaths in Channel crossing attempts across Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Three bodies were found on a small boat approaching the coast near Dunkirk to collect passengers, and rescue services took six people into their care, among them a one year old child. A separate boat sank off the seaside town of Hardelot late on Wednesday, and one man died.

The detail that describes the current pattern is the boat near Dunkirk. It was coming in to load rather than heading out, which is the taxi-boat method that has displaced launching from a beach: the vessel waits offshore or moves along the coast and people wade or swim out to it, because a boat that never sits on the sand is harder for police on the shore to stop.

That adaptation is a direct product of enforcement, and it has made the crossing more dangerous rather than less frequent. People board in the water, at night, often unable to swim, into a boat already overloaded and unstable before it turns for open sea. Several of the recent deaths have happened at that moment rather than mid-Channel.

The Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and the policy argument about it has been stuck in the same place for years, between deterrence on the French side and processing on the British side. What changes underneath that argument is the method, and each time it changes to evade enforcement it gets deadlier at the point where people get into the water.