SUE REID: How the 200,000th small-boat migrant to arrive here was relaxing in a 4-star hotel just 32 hours after landing
The 200,000th Channel migrant to officially reach Britain in the age of small boat crossings is living comfortably in a four-star hotel on the leafy edge of a Hampshire suburban town.
The Daily Mail tracked the young man to the £134-a-night Crowne Plaza in Basingstoke. He arrived there on a Home Office bus on Saturday afternoon, 32 hours after arriving in Dover.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs has been keeping official figures on the number of asylum seekers entering the country illegally on small boats since 2018. On Friday morning the migrant stepped from the dock of a Border Force ship onto the docks of Dover harbour, becoming the 200,000th person to do so.
The other 69 people on his boat entered the Crowne Plaza with him. All were from African and Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, whose recent refugees are a source of deep concern to security services there, who fear there may be terrorists loyal to the regime among them.
The men paid £1,500 each for the illegal sea crossing, generating £105,000 in profits for the smuggling gangs that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to ‘crush’ two years ago.
Migrant number 200,000, carrying a blue plastic bag containing his soaked clothes from the channel crossing and wearing a Home Office-made charcoal gray tracksuit and flip-flop sandals (issued to him in Dover on arrival), checked into the hotel less than three days after setting off from a French coast early on 8 May.
Her rubber dinghy was escorted by the French Navy auxiliary ship Ridens towards the coast of the United Kingdom.
Mid-Channel, he and others were transferred to the Border Force cutter Ranger, which brought the undercover travelers into Kent port just after 11am that day.
Some of the 69 people on the same boat with the 200,000th immigrant are staying in a four-star hotel. They all came from African and Middle Eastern countries
On Friday morning the migrant stepped from the dock of a Border Force ship onto the docks of Dover harbour, becoming the 200,000th person to do so.
A bus is arriving at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. There are seventy migrants on board who arrived in Dover on Friday
From there he was put on a bus 30 kilometers away to Manston processing camp in Kent, where the Daily Mail photographed his arrival.
He was met by three female immigration officers and taken to a tent where he was given free chips, water and fresh fruit.
The immigrants were then interviewed for the first time and each was asked about their name, age, country of origin and the reason for seeking asylum in that country.
From then on, immigrants were referred to by Manston staff as ‘residents’, a strange and evocative edict from the Home Office that human rights be respected.
Most of the men who arrived with the 200,000 immigrants did not speak English, and all were offered online translators; This imposed another heavy bill on taxpayers.
He was interrogated for less than an hour by a team of mostly immigration officials, despite the government raising the national threat level to ‘serious’ following the anti-Semitic Golders Green attacks last month.
In fact, one of the Crowne Plaza’s former immigrant guests was convicted at the Old Bailey earlier this month of plotting a terror-related attack on the Israeli embassy in London.
Abdullah Albadri, 34, stayed at the hotel the day after arriving by boat for the second time last spring.
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Groups of migrants can be seen arriving in Dover after being intercepted across the Channel by Border Force
The men paid £1,500 each for the illegal sea crossing, generating £105,000 in profits for the smuggling rings that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to ‘dismantle’ two years ago.
The group of migrants who arrived in Manston last Friday were served a hot meal after processing and given a bed to spend the night in the camp.
It is noteworthy that he was not perceived as a potential security threat, especially during the interview in the Manston camp. Just two weeks later, an illegal immigrant who was born in Kuwait but said he was from a stateless Bedouin tribe tried to scale the embassy walls with two large knives. He told the arresting police that he wanted to stop the war in Gaza.
The group of migrants who arrived in Manston last Friday were served a hot meal after processing and given a bed to spend the night in the camp. The next day, ‘residents’ were served breakfast and lunch, after which a bus picked them up at 3pm and took them to the Basingstoke hotel, 120 miles away.
We watched them leave Manston and arrive in the Hampshire town just after 5pm.
Security guards waited as they exited the vehicle’s rear door, which was parked near the entrance, to ensure their arrival was hidden from prying eyes.
When they entered, the clothes they wore for the Canal crossing were given back to them by Ministry of Internal Affairs personnel and they were shown to their rooms.
That evening they were given the option of dining in the restaurant or having takeout in their room (or outside on the porch in the evening sun). We know this because other residents of the Crowne Plaza, which was seized as an immigration hotel five years ago, were talking to us on the road outside.
They had returned from nearby shops and wandered the quiet streets of the Basingstoke suburb of Eastrop.
Two Afghans, one of whom had bought a new pack of headphones, said they arrived in England on a boat last Sunday (May 3), and that several hundred immigrants crossed the English Channel on a few merchant boats and arrived in Kent.
The duo, in their 20s, had poor English. But they smiled and said that the hotel’s food was good and that they loved England very much.
They added that they expect to buy a house soon. “We saw some of them leaving the hotel for their new homes this week,” said the tall Afghan.
Drone footage of a group of immigrants arriving at the Manston Processing Center after entering Dover
A view of the Crowne Plaza Hotel – now closed to the public. Seventy immigrants arriving on Friday were transported by bus from Manston Detention Center
Most of the men who arrived with the 200,000 immigrants did not speak English, and all were offered online translators
Four of the seventy immigrants who arrived together are seen walking, each dressed from head to toe in black.
Two Ethiopians, 30-year-old Nathaniel and his friend Chekole, also stopped to talk. Nathaniel proved knowledgeable about British politics.
‘There are many migrants who are not refugees being sent to the UK by smugglers,’ he said. ‘I believe the Reform Party will do this right. ‘The asylum system needs to be stopped, dismantled and restarted.’
Apologizing for his bad language, he said: ‘Traders don’t care***. They direct immigrants to the UK, and only the UK. They push you into boats. They don’t care if you live or die, they want the money.
‘We are honestly concerned about the number of Muslims in the hotel and in the UK. Because we Christians come from Ethiopia, we know what they can do to us.
‘We love England. We want to give it to your country. Not everyone who comes to the boats has the same feeling. You must understand this.’
After first looking around to check that no one was watching (most boat migrants in UK hotels are Muslims), they each nervously pulled out the cross they wore on a chain around their necks from under their T-shirts.
‘After reaching France via Libya, we had to hide our Christianity while waiting there for a month,’ said Nathaniel.
‘All of those in the camps are Muslims. “We are less afraid here in Britain,” he added, noting that its name comes from the Bible.
In 25 years, I can count the number of Christian immigrants who have set out for the UK on the fingers of one hand. Nathaniel agrees that he and Chekole are rare figures among the 200,000 people targeted in Britain since 2018.
The very next morning, Sunday, migrants numbering 200,000 and their boatmates stepped out of the hotel to get some air and explore the surroundings.
Four Iranians, one claiming to be 31, another 29, and two 17, stopped to chat about their journey.
I didn’t ask these four why they came. They didn’t tell me either. But what we do know is that they were allowed into our country after inadequate checks and that our security services warned that small boats carrying migrants were likely to be used by proxies of Iran’s feared Revolutionary Guard Corps to infiltrate Britain.
The truth is, we don’t know who woke up at the Crowne Plaza Hotel this morning with murderous intentions for our country.
What we do know is that it is impossible for the Home Office to know this either, given the speed at which it screens migrants by boat.
The Government contract with Crowne Plaza will expire in September and renovations will take place before it reopens to the public.
By then boat migrants numbering 200,000 will be living in a free house or flat, with a weekly benefit payment of around £50 to enable them to live the way they hope to live in their new country from which they will almost never leave.
