Essex truck horror highlights risks desperate migrants take to reach UK
- Campaigners say UK government crackdown has led some people to resort to desperate measures
- British police launch murder investigation after discovery of 39 bodies in a container
A lack of safe and legal routes into the UK is in part driving a dependence on life-threatening methods including squeezing into the back of refrigerated lorries or riding in vulnerable dinghies across wild seas.
People fleeing the threat of torture, rape or death cannot claim asylum in the UK without physically reaching Britain, aside from the limited Syrian refugee resettlement programme.
Family reunion routes – that is, those granted refugee status in the UK being able to apply to bring relatives to join them – have been drastically curtailed.
The UK gave protection – grants of asylum, humanitarian protection or alternative forms of leave and resettlement – to 18,519 people in the year ending June 2019, according to the most recently available figures.
However, it is relatively hard to secure asylum in the UK, which hosts less than 1 per cent of the world’s refugees.
