Experts have urged the government to introduce safe routes to the UK after openDemocracy revealed that almost 400 people have died while trying to cross the English Channel in the past 25 years.
The government has committed more than £800m to Channel-related immigration measures since 2014, with money spent on security and deterrence measures including fences, walls, barbed wire, patrol officers and dogs, infrared detectors and lorry-sized X-ray machines.
Yet 391 people have lost their lives at the UK’s border since 1999, an average of one death every month, according to an investigation by French newspaper Les Jours, which openDemocracy has exclusively published in English.
