SUE REID: The moment Britain’s 200,000th Channel migrant landed in Dover after being ‘plucked from rubber boat’

The Border Force ship Ranger docked at Dover’s Kent port at 11am yesterday morning carrying 64 migrants.

After leaving the Dunkirk coast, the migrants were taken from their rubber boats in the middle of the Channel by the French navy before being handed over to the British ship.

It has become an almost daily occurrence as the influx of refugees into the UK continues almost unchecked.

But one of those who boarded the Ranger will go down in history as the 200,000th immigrant to officially reach these shores by small boat since records began in 2018.

Using the Government’s own figures, the Daily Mail calculated yesterday that the arrival of just 57 more migrants would take us to the controversial 200,000 mark.

In the photo above, we circled the young man we think is Immigrant No. 200,000.

He will come from a Third World country, have a pathetic tale of hardship to tell, and so he will seek asylum.

It will likely take years for his case to work its way through the immigration system, and the chances of him leaving the country either voluntarily or through deportation are slim to none.

Britain committed a bizarre act of self-harm by letting him in and the tens of thousands of people ahead of him.

I reported that our offshore borders have been abused by illegal immigrants for 25 years. This is a phenomenon that not only makes us a laughing stock in the eyes of the world, but also jeopardizes the well-being of our own citizens by putting our public services under unbearable pressure.

Immigrant No. 200,000 will have woken up at Manston processing center in Kent this morning; Here, all arrivals by illegal boats are sent for an initial interview by Border Force officials for up to 72 hours.

They will ask your name, age and nationality, but there is no guarantee that you will answer honestly.

This weekend number 200,000 will leave Manston and be sent by bus to a Home Office hotel, where they will live free of charge – with a benefit of £49 a month – for weeks, perhaps months, perhaps years.

This extraordinary scenario would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Yes, as Britain became the first easy target of mass illegal immigration at the turn of the century, immigrants were hiding in trucks on ferries coming from France.

But in 2016, things took a turn for the worse. Discarded rubber dinghies have started to appear on the Kent and East Sussex beaches.

The same story happened in 2017; That year, I began investigating what I suspected was a new illegal way of reaching the UK: small boats.

In 2018, 299 migrants arrived from Calais on smugglers’ boats. The first photographs showed a group of men wrapped in blankets on the dunes of Kent, the flimsy boat that had carried them 33 kilometers out to sea lying among rocks in shallow water.

It was impossible not to sympathize with them. But soon the trickle of individual boats turned into a military-style operation run by ruthless human smugglers.

Ships produced in China and sent to secret locations in Europe became increasingly larger. Today, they carry 60 or 70 people, not five or six people like in 2018.

The Tory government turned a blind eye. My warnings, published in the Daily Mail, that the occasional boats run by a few immigrants from Calais had become a daily armada were ignored.

I even rented a rubber boat for myself in late 2018. With the help of a captain, I traveled without a passport from Gravelines in Northern France to Dover to highlight the growing scandal and danger of our open borders.

More than 70,000 people have reached the south coast in small boats since Labor came to power in July 2024, and many more will follow Migrant No. 200,000 unless something is done quickly to stop them.

In late 2024 I took part in a two-part BBC documentary examining the issue of open borders.

I was invited to the program because I had met and interviewed 500 immigrants to Britain from areas as far afield as Northern France, Türkiye and the Greek Islands.

Along with me were former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron and a group of former Home Office Ministers.

They were all, to some extent, the architects of our fatally flawed immigration policy. However, faced with the dangers of the BBC opening the borders, they either avoided the question or gave a passive response. None of them apologized.

I alone spoke the truth: ‘A country without borders is not really a country. It’s just a piece of land for anyone who wants to come and live there.’

If we consider only immigrants arriving by boat, the number of 200,000 immigrants (a number roughly equal to the population of Bournemouth or Norwich) is almost too fantastic to comprehend.

It is not cruel to say enough is enough. I met real refugees, many of them families with children trying to reach Britain.

They are now among the victims of this free-for-all system: pushed aside by young, always male, economic migrants who can pay traffickers to gain priority access to boats in France and Belgium.

And once they get here, they are often the source of social upheaval. Every day, desperate people in Britain send me videos of street violence, predatory sexual behavior against women and girls, and the general hoodlum behavior of the tens of thousands of illegals from foreign cultures and religions we have allowed into our country.

The British public’s attitude towards uncontrolled borders has been expressed openly and repeatedly for two decades.

There was no clearer indication of this discontent than at the ballot box yesterday, where Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration UK Reform Party triumphed in local elections.

But the British asylum system, which costs at least £4.7bn a year, continues to grow, thanks to the vociferous support of opportunistic charities, greedy immigration lawyers and left-wing politicians.

Of course, Immigrant No. 200,000 cannot be personally blamed. He’ll be in a warm hotel room on Monday, hoping to soon have a home, free medical care and ongoing benefits. In short, everything the gangs in France had promised to persuade him to buy a £4,000 road trip ticket.

He will also prepare his history of repression and persecution, carefully prepared with the help of philanthropists in France, to assist in his asylum claim.

If he is an extremely homophobic Ugandan, he will act gay. If he is Iranian, he will say that he is a Christian convert who suffered terribly under a brutal Islamic regime.

Or if he is an Eritrean, his story will be that his country’s terrible military dictatorship means he faces lifelong service in the army.

Whatever the situation, there will come a time when we must harden our hearts to save ourselves.

The answer to him and other fake boat migrants seeking asylum should be a resolute ‘No’.