16-language ‘instruction manual’ for crossing the English Channel handed out in French migrant camps
CP
A 16-language “instruction manual” for crossing the Channel is circulating in Dunkirk migrant camps, complete with weather tips, asylum coaching and a QR code to an NGO hotline. Vicky Richer investigates.
On a stretch of scrubland outside Dunkirk, a glossy leaflet in sixteen languages is teaching migrants how to time a small-boat crossing of the English Channel and how to claim asylum in Britain.
Retrieved this week by MP Lee Anderson, the pamphlet has thrown a spotlight on the humanitarian architecture, and the £662 million of British money, that surrounds Europe’s most contested border.
On a stretch of scrubland outside Dunkirk, where hundreds of men live under tarpaulins within earshot of the sea they intend to cross, a glossy leaflet is circulating that reads less like a humanitarian warning and more like an operating manual. Available in sixteen languages, from Arabic and Farsi to Kurdish Sorani, Hindi and Somali, the document instructs migrants on how to time a small-boat crossing of the English Channel, what weather to avoid, and, crucially, how to claim asylum once they set foot on British soil.
An Arabic edition of the pamphlet was retrieved this week by Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, during a two-day visit to the informal camp at Loon-Plage, which French authorities and the migration monitor InfoMigrants describe as one of the largest informal encampments in northern France. Anderson, whose visit was first reported by The Telegraph, told the newspaper the document was “like an instruction manual, showing you how to cross the Channel ‘safely’ and what to do when you reach the UK.”
What the leaflet says
The pamphlet opens with a warning that doubles as a sales pitch: “Crossing to the UK is very dangerous, this information may save your life.” It then proceeds with a sequence of practical instructions that would not be out of place in a coastguard bulletin. Migrants are told not to attempt the journey without an engine, to beware of fog and winds above ten knots, to stay clear of large ships because “they make big waves and don’t see you”, and never to try if waves exceed half a metre. They are advised never to leave the boat or attempt to swim, and reminded that conditions at sea are colder and windier than on land.
A QR code printed on the leaflet directs readers to the website of Alarm Phone, a Europe-wide hotline for migrants in distress that publishes real-time weather data for the Strait of Dover, including wave heights. Alarm Phone, whose operations were originally focused on the Mediterranean, has expanded its footprint to the Channel, and its own research, cited in a 2025 report co-authored with academics at the University of Sheffield and hosted on the site of Dr Lucy Mayblin (lucymayblin.com), argues that increased UK enforcement funding is producing more overcrowded boats, more chaotic departures and, ultimately, more deaths.
A second link leads to an animated cartoon, produced by the British charity Right to Remain, which walks new arrivals through the mechanics of a UK asylum claim. The video, available in nine languages, has been viewed more than 65,000 times, according to figures on the charity’s own platform, while the accompanying written asylum advice has been accessed almost 60,000 times.
“In order to prove that a fear of persecution is well-founded, i.e. likely, you will need to provide evidence,” the guidance reads. “The evidence that everyone has is their story. In many cases, the decision-makers do not believe you when you tell your story.” Applicants are advised to gather medical records, arrest warrants, court documents, letters from friends or organisations, newspaper coverage and human-rights reports, and to “start thinking about it as soon as possible” because “it can take time to get this evidence.”
The numbers behind the crisis
The scale of the phenomenon the leaflet is designed to navigate is now substantial. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, approximately 36,000 people arrived in the United Kingdom by small boat in the year ending 31 May 2026, a 13 per cent fall on the previous twelve months but still historically high. The House of Commons Library reports that 39,000 people arrived by small boat in the year to March 2026, accounting for roughly 90 per cent of all detected irregular arrivals.
The boats themselves are becoming more crowded. Analysis compiled by InfoMigrants shows that an average of roughly sixty-five people were packed onto each dinghy in the first half of 2026, compared with fifty-eight in the same period a year earlier. The Migration Observatory recorded twenty-four confirmed deaths in the Channel in 2025, down from seventy-three in 2024, though a separate tally by Agence France-Presse of French and British sources put the 2025 figure at twenty-nine. Between 2018 and 2025, at least 162 people have died attempting the crossing.
On the asylum side, the House of Commons Library records 82,100 asylum applications in the UK in 2025, easing to 76,714 applications relating to 93,525 people in the year to March 2026, a 9 per cent decline. According to Home Office statistics, the grant rate at initial decision fell to 39 per cent in the year to March 2026, compared with 49 per cent the year before, a decline that has coincided with a shrinking backlog and tighter credibility assessments.
The confrontation at the camp
Anderson’s fact-finding trip did not go unnoticed by the French authorities. On Wednesday morning, the MP and his team were stopped by police as they approached the beach at Gravelines, a known launch point, and again in the afternoon when roughly a dozen officers demanded to see his passport as he walked toward the Loon-Plage camp from the main road. Anderson, in a moment captured on camera and later broadcast on GB News, attempted to hand over his London Oyster travel card and, when the officers asked for a driving licence, replied: “What if I am an illegal migrant? Can I go and camp in there?”
“They let the migrants camp here and straight away they ask for our ID again,” Anderson said afterwards. “I am pretty sure they are not asking to see the identification of the illegal migrants. It makes you wonder: we pay them all that money and they treat us like illegal invaders.” He added that the camp “will be full of criminals, but we’re the people who entered this country legally two days ago, it’s us that’s been treated like criminals.”
The reference to money is not rhetorical. Under a three-year funding agreement documented by the House of Commons Library, the United Kingdom has committed £662 million (€767 million) to France between 2026/27 and 2028/29 to disrupt the smuggling networks and patrol the coastline. This sits on top of £476 million already paid under earlier arrangements, and a further £161 million agreed under the new UK-France partnership announced by the Home Office, which allocates £500 million to strengthen French border controls. Critics point out that despite this expenditure, the camp at Loon-Plage continues to grow, and the leaflet has reached at least sixteen linguistic communities.
Questioning the humanitarian architecture
Anderson’s central charge is that a shadow economy of humanitarian actors, some funded by donors and some, indirectly, by Western taxpayers, has become structurally invested in the continuation of the crossings. “I keep banging on about this trade in people’s lives, it’s all organised,” he said. “I think the police are complicit in this as well, and the NGOs, for me, are the biggest part of the problem, literally encouraging people to set up this camp, they’re feeding them.”
He was careful to draw a distinction between basic humanity and systemic enablement. “There’s nothing wrong with feeding people and giving them water, obviously, that’s the humane and kind thing to do. But they’re giving them hope, hope that they can come to a better life in the UK, and that, unfortunately, is costing lots of lives in the Channel.”
The question of why non-governmental organisations, and by extension the governments that indirectly fund them through grants, contracts and tax-advantaged donations, would provide navigational instructions and asylum-claim tutorials to people whose only route into Britain is illegal, is one the sector itself has struggled to answer publicly. Organisations active in the northern French corridor, including Care4Calais, Utopia 56, the French Red Cross and Secours Populaire Français, defend their work on the grounds that the crossings will happen with or without them, and that harm reduction, ensuring that dinghies are not overloaded, that departures are not attempted in fog, that asylum claims are properly documented, saves lives and reduces the burden on the British legal system.
Sceptics respond with three counter-arguments. First, the funding trail: British donors, including foundations such as Choose Love, which scaled back its Calais grants in 2021 according to The Guardian, and various charitable trusts, have poured millions into the Calais-Dunkirk corridor. Second, the incentive structure: providing weather forecasts, safety instructions and pre-arrival legal coaching arguably lowers the perceived risk of a crossing and raises its expected reward, encouraging the very behaviour it purports to mitigate. Third, the political economy: French and British bureaucracies have themselves grown around the crisis, with the UK Home Office’s asylum-processing apparatus, private accommodation contractors and French gendarmerie units all drawing budgets that depend, in part, on the persistence of the flow.
The 39 per cent grant rate at initial decision, published by the Home Office, also complicates the humanitarian narrative. It implies that a majority of those coached through the process by NGO literature are ultimately found not to meet the Refugee Convention threshold at first instance, though many will appeal successfully. That gap between the promise embedded in the leaflet, a “better life in the UK”, and the statistical reality is, for critics, the strongest indictment of the current arrangement.
An unresolved bargain
For now, the tent city at Loon-Plage remains, cleared periodically by French police and, just as reliably, reconstituted within days. The leaflet, downloadable, translatable and by design difficult to suppress, will outlast any individual eviction. Alarm Phone will continue to publish wave heights. Right to Remain will continue to circulate its cartoon. The UK Treasury will continue to transfer sums that would fund a mid-sized hospital to the French interior ministry, and the boats will continue to leave from the beaches at Gravelines and Wimereux whenever the wind drops below ten knots.
Anderson’s visit will not, in itself, change any of this. But by physically retrieving the pamphlet from the mud of Loon-Plage and holding it up to the camera, he has forced into public view an artefact that the humanitarian sector, the French state and successive British governments have found it convenient not to discuss. Whether that artefact is best understood as a lifeline or as a business card for one of Europe’s most lucrative illicit trades is the argument that Britain, in the autumn of 2026, still cannot bring itself to settle.
By Vicky Richter at the Great British PAC.
AI-generated illustration created by Great British PAC. Created for editorial and illustrative purposes.
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(UKR)