What have migrants got against France?

Pitching your tent for weeks on end in the cold and mud, with no power or plumbing. Running in a pack after accelerating lorries and clutching frantically at the back door handles. Risking not only your own life but even the lives of your children by crowding into unseaworthy dinghies, in which to drift precariously across the busiest shipping lane in the world… All this full-tilt determination to flee intolerable circumstances and get into the comparative Valhalla of the UK makes perfect sense — if the place you’re so desperate to leave behind is war-torn Syria or famine-ravaged Yemen. But the country on whose coast these yearning, immiserated would-be UK immigrants are camped, and have historically camped for 20 years, is France.

Excuse me. What’s wrong with France? Some Iranians the Border Force scooped from the Channel over the holidays may have been Christians in flight from religious persecution, but last time I checked, France, at least nominally, was Catholic.