We will never know precisely who Channel migrant number 100,000 was, but we do know he was one of around 700 arrivals brought into Dover on Thursday.
And we can be fairly confident that number 100,000 was indeed a ‘he’, as 85 per cent of the small boat migrants are male compared, for instance, to our authorised Ukrainian refugee scheme in which women have outnumbered men by a ratio of two to one.
The British state first acknowledged this illicit traffic to be a crisis on 29 December, 2018, when the then home secretary Sajid Javid cut short a family holiday to deal with the arrival of around 200 people by small boat that month.
By summer 2019, the new PM Boris Johnson felt the issue was sufficiently serious to record a piece to camera designed to create a deterrent effect, in which he pledged to prospective arrivals: ‘We will send you back.’
It is a measure of how the crisis has escalated to note that Johnson was at the time addressing himself to just the second cohort of 1,000 Channel migrants who were then preparing to set out for Blighty.
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