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Migrants seeking English soil halted at Channel Tunnel

French officials say thousands are being turned back

French police stopped migrants in Calais as they sought to get through the Channel Tunnel on Wednesday. Yoan Valat/European Pressphoto Agency

LONDON — They have reached Europe after treacherous journeys, usually across the Mediterranean. They have dodged the authorities as they made their way northward toward their ultimate goal, Britain.

But now, thousands of illegal migrants, refugees from war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, find themselves bottled up at one final choke point in northern France: the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.

Over two nights this week, their desperation and frustration have flared to new levels as they have tried in far larger numbers than normal to breach the security around the tunnel and hide themselves amid the trucks and freight being shuttled by rail from Calais to southern England.

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French police said there had been about 2,100 attempts by migrants to gain access to the tunnel Monday, and Eurotunnel, the company that operates the 31-mile English Channel crossing, put the number for Tuesday night at about 1,500.

At least one migrant, believed to be a Sudanese man, died in the attempts this week. An unknown number slipped through, authorities said.

Most of those who tried were caught and turned back — free, by and large, to try again, leaving the governments of France and Britain scrambling to shore up defenses around the tunnel and deal with the political and economic reverberations from the latest flash point in Europe’s escalating migrant crisis.

The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, sent 120 additional police officers to Calais on Wednesday and described the city, a port on the English Channel, as “a mirror of the conflicts and crises that are tearing some of the world’s regions apart.”

In London, British ministers and other officials held emergency talks as pressure mounted for a more robust response to a situation that has disrupted trade and tourism and put two of the world’s wealthiest nations at the center of the debate over how to cope with a seemingly unstoppable tide of migrants seeking a better life.

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Mattia Toaldo, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research institute, said there would “be more of these flash points, because the number of migrants is growing, and to much higher numbers than in the past.”

Calais has joined other spots in Europe that are becoming synonymous with the Continent’s inability to halt the flow of migrants into its territory and agree on a way to handle those who make it.

They include the islands of Lampedusa in Italy and Lesbos in Greece, where many migrants first land; the fence that Hungary is erecting along its border with Serbia, the latest effort to stop them from migrating northward; and towns like Ventimiglia, Italy, on the border with France, where the authorities are making it harder for them to proceed.

“What we are seeing is the result of the European Union not being able to handle the migration crisis in the way that they should,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, a research fellow at the Center for European Reform, a research institute.

“Everyone is blaming each other for not handling the crisis properly,” she said. “The Italians and Greeks are blaming everyone else for not helping them. France is blaming Italy for giving documents to asylum-seekers, without checking them properly, so they can move on.”

The English Channel is a focus of the broader European crisis because many migrants are trying to travel to Britain, where they believe they will find it easier to secure work. The country also appears more attractive because Britain does not operate an identity card system and because many migrants speak some English.

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Calais is certainly feeling the strain. Eurotunnel said in a statement Wednesday that it had intercepted more than 37,000 migrants since January.

Emmanuel Agius, deputy mayor of Calais, said in an interview Wednesday that the city would like help from the United Nations to deal with the migrants, and he called for a summit meeting with the leaders of Britain and France to address the situation.

“The city is continuing to suffer from this issue, economically and tourism-wise,” he said. Like other French officials, he suggested that Britain needed to do more to make itself a less appealing destination and to control the migrant flow on its side of the English Channel.

That sentiment has provoked a political reaction in Britain, where the government’s ability to police its frontiers has been questioned and where frustration with what many see as an insufficient response by France is growing.