British politicians have been urged to look at how Australia turns back the boats in dealing with its own migrant crisis in the English Channel.
Yesterday the 100th asylum seeker since Christmas landed on the Kent coast in a rubber dinghy from France. In the past few days scores of other migrants, mainly claiming to be Iranian, have been found in the busy shipping lanes in the Channel and taken to Dover by the British coastguard.
The increasing numbers of boat migrants has been blamed on pressure from people smugglers, who have been telling the migrants that the borders will be tightened after March 29, when the UK leaves the European Union, but also because of calm weather. US sanctions on Iran are also blamed, as is recent French police clampdowns on the thousands of migrants who gather around Calais. But as many as 40,000 Iranians were able to enter Serbia earlier this year without visas and many are believed to be relatively wealthy and paying smugglers to get them into the UK.
The former leader of the UK Independence Party, and Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the country should be looking to Australia and to return the migrants back to France.
Read the article by Jacquelin Magnay in The Australian.