France should deploy Texas-style “buoy blockades” in shallow waters off the coast of northern France to prevent people smugglers launching small boats into the sea, says the former immigration minister.
Robert Jenrick, who this week will visit the US’s southern border with Mexico, believes France needs to ramp up its use of the tethered buoys to block the passage of the small boats at “hot spot” beaches on its Channel coast.
Mr Jenrick worked with his French counterparts, as immigration minister until last December, to block off canals and rivers leading to the Channel using the chains of buoys to prevent small boats packed with migrants making their way to the sea.
He believes the French should go further and this week he will visit El Paso in Texas where 1,000 ft long chains of buoys are being used in the Rio Grande to prevent illegal migrants crossing the river from Mexico.
He will meet Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, who has deployed the massive buoy barrier in “high-traffic” areas. The buoys, which rotate so that migrants cannot climb over them, are fastened to the river’s bottom, with nets below the waterline to prevent people swimming underneath.
Mr Jenrick, who quit the Cabinet over his belief that Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill did not go far enough, said similar tactics at hotspot beaches in northern France could make launching the small boats from those locations virtually impossible.
He believes it would also free up police officers from those locations to cover a wider range of the 100-mile long stretch of northern French beaches used by the people smugglers.
“The Western world faces a migration crisis. It’s vital the UK adopts the latest technology and the most effective tactics from other countries that are facing similar challenges,” said Mr Jenrick.
“As immigration minister, I worked with French officers to deploy buoys to blockade the smuggler’s boats. They proved highly effective and as the Governor of Texas has now shown they work at scale too.
“As currently conceived the Rwanda policy won’t provide the effective and sustainable deterrent we desperately need.
“The Government can’t afford to simply wait and see. We need to be doing absolutely everything we can to end this national security emergency. More blockades aren’t a silver bullet, but they would provide an important step forward.”
Mr Jenrick said the buoy blockade would be a boost to the extra defences already being put in place by the French as part of the £478 million three-year deal that Mr Sunak agreed with Emanuel Macron, the president of France, in March last year to stop the crossings.
As a result of the deal, the number of officers deployed on foot or in buggies on the French beaches has more than doubled to some 800 every night.
Last month the French also agreed to start using drones for surveillance on a regular basis after a legal hitch prevented their deployment.
The extra defences – including the buoy blockades of rivers and canals – are believed to have contributed to a 36 per cent fall in the number of illegal Channel crossings last year from 45,774 to 29,437.
French border force and police tethered the buoys across the inland waterways after smuggling gangs changed tactics and started using them to evade the patrols of officers and the intense surveillance on the beaches.
The gangs transported empty “taxi boats” down the rivers, waterways and canals to the sea before sailing them along the northern French coast to pick up the migrants at a pre-arranged rendezvous to then take them across the Channel.
The tactic capitalised on the French refusal to stop the boats once they were at sea because of the risk to life from capsizing. Because the migrants wade into the water to get onto the “taxi boats”, the French have been reluctant to intervene.
Instead, the French have blocked rivers such as the Authie and Canche by using chains of buoys to create a floating barrier near their estuaries where they flow into the English Channel.
Following his visit to the US-Mexico border, Mr Jenrick will travel to Washington DC on Wednesday where he will set out his views on the migration crisis in a speech at the Heritage Foundation and meet with lawmakers in Congress.
