Slumped on the curb of a dusty road on the outskirts of Calais is Mustafa.
Hailing from Sudan, he’s made the 3,000-mile trip to France, hoping he can get to Britain on a small boat.
The issue he has is the cost. “I don’t have €500 or €1,500 to pay,” he told the Daily Express.
“I have no money to make the crossing at all.”
Although these figures are six times less than prices being quoted by trafficking gangs on social media, for a man whose only way to eat is to wait for meals provided by the local Roman Catholic church or migrant charities raising such a sum is totally unrealistic.
One solution is to try to follow a group of paying customers being escorted by a smuggler to the beaches.
But as our journalists have seen firsthand, that is an incredibly dangerous tactic, freeloaders seeking to jump aboard a trafficker’s vessel are savagely beaten or pulled into the water.
Read more… The likelihood French will stem flow of boats is near zero, says Stephen Pollard
As he bides his time for some type of opportunity to arise, Mustafa continues to live in the Sundanese migrant camp – one of the many smaller dwellings established in the wake of the destruction of the infamous Calais “jungle”.
With numbers in the low hundreds, local police told us these smaller encampments were divided by ethnic group in a bid to avoid the fighting that occasionally broke out when large numbers of people seeking to travel to the UK were mixed together.
Located under a cluster of trees between two motorways, the Sudanese camp is one of the most deprived.
Some of the men living there have done so for over a year. This is because, unlike other migrant dwellings where our reporters were told those looking to make the trip have access to funds, in this camp they have to devise other methods for getting across the Channel.
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“People will join together to buy a boat,” explained Ameir, a Sudanese man in his late fifties with a grey moustache.
“There are different types of boats, six metres, eight metres and 14 metres. The [larger boats] will take 70 people or 80 people.”
The cost Ameir said was around €70 to €80, not an insubstantial amount for someone with so little, but significantly less than the smuggler’s price.
We tried to establish how these boats were being sourced but the answer was unclear.
“You cannot buy them from the shops,” Ameir continued, “there are people who come around ‘producers’ [of boats].”
The group would not be drawn on whether the boats were purchased online or through some other channel.
But one thing is clear: Whoever is selling dinghies to the camps is playing a dangerous game.
They are undercutting smugglers who could be earning tens of thousands from 80-person small boat crossings, a decision that risks extreme violence or worse.
This wasn’t the only story we heard in Calais about migrants mysteriously coming into the possession of tools that enabled them to make a potentially deadly journey to the UK.
A French policeman, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, said that he had caught a group of migrants using an angle grinder to cut a hole through the expensive fencing erected around the lorry parks in Calais at the expense of the UK taxpayer.
They were reluctant to speculate too much on who exactly had given them the tool but it was clear that it was someone with money.
The eight-metre dinghies Ameir and his friends are seeking to buy typically have a capacity of 20-25 people so we asked them about the dangers of loading them with four times that number.
They replied by saying the groups regularly checked weather forecasts to see whether conditions were preferable.
All the Sudanese migrants we met said they fled the country because of the internal conflicts that have raged to varying degrees for the past half-century.
They said that one of the reasons they wanted to come to the UK was because of the colonial rule which ran from 1899 to 1956. They argued this time in the British Empire had established a cultural link between the two countries.
“It is because Britain acquired Sudan earlier in history,” Ameir added, “There has been a strong relation[ship], many people from there will study in the UK. Everybody hears about England in the villages.
“Everyone is focusing [on getting] there because England got many benefits from Sudan earlier.”
Ameir and the others in the camp were keen to explain that this colonial past made them feel as if they had a connection to the Royal Family who had previously been the head of state.
“We like the King and the Royal Family because they see the value of the Sudan,” he added.
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