LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron are tackling a problem that has plagued previous British and French governments: how to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats. This comes after the camaraderie and banquets of a formal state visit.
Senior officials from the two nations will attempt to finalize agreements on defense cooperation, economic growth, and the most difficult of all—unauthorized migration—at a U.K.-France summit on Thursday that concludes Macron’s three-day visit.
Macron and Starmer will also go to a military base and listen in on a coalition of the willing planning meeting, which is a plan for an international force supported by the United Kingdom and France to ensure a future truce in Ukraine.
Addressing small boat crossings “is a shared priority that requires shared solutions, including a new deterrent to break the business model” of people-smuggling gangs, the two leaders said during a meeting held Wednesday inside 10 Downing St., according to Starmer’s office.
It stated that on Thursday, they will strive for tangible progress.
Channel crossings have always been a problem.
Britain sees thousands of highly visible landings every year when migrants cross the 20-mile (32-kilometer) channel from northern France in cramped boats, while it receives fewer asylum-seekers than Mediterranean European nations.
More than 20,000 people crossed the channel in the first half of 2025, up over 50% from the same period the previous year, while about 37,000 people were caught doing so in 2024. Attempts to reach the English coast have resulted in the deaths of several.
Although they have long disagreed on how to handle the issue, Britain and France agree that the hazardous and uncontrolled crossings are a problem.
The United Kingdom has paid the Paris government hundreds of millions of pounds (dollars, euros) to expand patrols and share intelligence in an effort to disrupt the smuggling gangs, and it wants France to do more to stop boats from leaving the beaches.
Starmer informed members in the House of Commons on Wednesday that we now exchange information to a far larger extent than we did previously. We are the first administration to convince the French to examine their rules and tactics on the north shore in order to take more effective action, and we have a new specialized intelligence unit in Dunkirk.
According to Macron, Britain needs to address pull factors such as the belief that it is simple for undocumented migrants to get employment in the United Kingdom. Additionally, a lot of migrants wish to travel to Britain because they speak English or because they have connections or relatives there.
The answers have been elusive.
In 2001, the two nations were debating how to prevent migrants from utilizing the tunnel beneath the canal to stow away on trains and trucks.
Before attempting to reach Britain, thousands of migrants assembled in camps near Calais, which were wiped out by French police in the next years. Increased security significantly decreased vehicle stowaways, but starting about 2018, people-smugglers provided migrants with an alternative maritime option.
According to Mihnea Cuibus, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, “you see that pattern again and again, where smuggling gangs and migrants try to find new ways to cross from France to the U.K.” When the government cracks down on that, gangs and migrants eventually try to adjust. And it turns into a sort of cat-and-mouse game.
Following Britain’s contentious exit from the European Union in 2020, cooperation to halt the boats stalled; however, in recent years, the two nations have reached a number of agreements whereby the United Kingdom pays France to strengthen police and drone patrols along the coast.
In 2022, the former Conservative administration in Britain devised a controversial plan to send asylum-seekers who arrived by boat to Rwanda. After he became office in July 2024, Starmersoon withdrew it after critics deemed it immoral and impracticable.
Britain wants a return agreement with France.
Closer collaboration with France and nations higher up the migration routes from Africa and the Middle East is what Starmer is betting on for success.
In recent days, British authorities have applauded the sight of officers slashing rubber dinghies with knives and have been calling for French police to intervene more forcibly to stop boats once they have left the coast.
The United Kingdom has proposed a one-in, one-out agreement that would allow the United Kingdom to welcome migrants who want to join family in Britain in exchange for France taking back those migrants who have already arrived in the country.
Macron stated that the presidents would strive for observable outcomes on a problem that burdens both of our nations.
According to Cuibus, irregular cross-channel migration will probably always be a problem, but if the policies being debated by France and Britain are properly implemented, they could have an effect.
But, he said, that’s a big if.
