A tenfold increase The real story behind the surge in Vietnamese boat crossings

The people from Vietnam trying to get to England on small boats across the Channel stand out from the rest of those drawn to the Pas de Calais coastline.

- Daniel Boffey

They are notably young, many just teenagers. They tend to stick together and avoid the attention of the aid workers off ering food and water down at the beach or in the forests where they sleep at night.

They appear nervous, under pressure, but such is their smart dress that charity volunteers say they could be mistaken for tourists. They seem to have money, too.

“When the police block them from getting on the boats, we have had some people from Vietnam ask how to get a taxi back to where they are staying,” said Sophie Roux, 32, a volunteer with the charity Osmose 62 . “We say it might be €200 (£170) and they say it isn’t a problem.”

A new group of about 200 people from Vietnam, about half of them women, had arrived in the area on Monday, of which scores had hoped to be on a dinghy going across the Channel at first light the next day.

Their handlers had to turn them back round at the beach in the immediate wake of the latest horror on the coast when five people, including a girl aged six and a half said to be from Iraq or Kuwait, die near Wimereux , a quiet town 20 miles south of Calais. They would try again when the weather cleared, they said.

This week, when trailing his intention to plough on with his policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, Rishi Sunak mentioned the Vietnamese.

The trafficking gangs had “shifted their attentions towards vulnerable Vietnamese migrants”, the prime minister said. “Vietnamese arrivals have increased ten fold,” and they “ account for almost all of the increase in small boat numbers we have seen this year ”.