Why the small-boats crisis is the biggest issue in Britain

Over the past year, public frustration and anger has reached boiling point over the British state’s ongoing failure to tackle the small-boats crisis.

Despite its pre-election promise to ‘smash the gangs’ smuggling migrants across the English Channel, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has actually overseen an increase in small-boat arrivals. In the year ending September 2025, a total of 45,659 migrants arrived illegally on our shores. This marked a 53 per cent increase on the previous year, this is very close to the record set in 2022.

Public discontent over illegal migration has been fuelled not only by the number of new arrivals, but also by the state’s generosity towards some of them. Many migrants are housed in hotels – in some cases, four-star establishments like the Suites Hotel in Knowsley, Merseyside, where violent unrest broke out in February 2023. The authorities’ decision to use hotels to host asylum seekers has come at huge expense to the taxpayer, costing £2.1 billion – an average of about £5.8million per day – between April 2024 and March 2025. It also deprives many communities of a much-valued local asset, a venue hitherto used for anything from wedding receptions to birthday parties.

To compound matters, the Home Office has been dispersing illegal migrants in some of the poorest parts of the country, largely because accommodation is cheaper there. Predictably, this has been the source of a great deal of local tension, with asylum seekers seen living state-funded lives in hotels while locals struggle amid deprivation and scarce social housing.

Over the past year, however, a greater and more serious issue has come to the fore – the threat posed by the small-boats emergency to public safety, especially for women and girls.

The problem is that the vast majority (68 per cent) of small-boat arrivals since 2018 have been young, unattached males, aged between 18 and 39. What’s more, in the year up to September 2025, 56 per cent of arrivals were from Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. Without wishing to indulge in divisive generalisations, this has meant that illegal migrants have overwhelmingly been young men from places with vastly different social and cultural norms. It does not take a social scientist to work out that housing thousands upon thousands of young, time-rich men from places where backward, sexist attitudes dominate might pose a threat to the safety of British women and girls.

And so it has proved. During 2025, male small-boat arrivals have been responsible for a series of high-profile attacks in the UK. There was the shocking case of Afghan teenagers Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, who were both jailed for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa, a normally a quiet, pleasant town in Warwickshire. Another Afghan national, 23-year-old Ahmad Mulakhil, recently confessed to raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, also in Warwickshire. Then there was the case of Sudanese small-boat migrant Deng Chol Majek, who stabbed to death 27-year-old mother Rhiannon Whyte in Walsall.

These and other cases like them have understandably prompted a major backlash. Indeed, the nationwide asylum-hotel demonstrations this summer were sparked by the sexual assault of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Epping, Essex by Ethiopian small-boat migrant Hadush Kebatu. He had been living at the Bell Hotel, situated just a half a mile away from a school. He also sexually assaulted a woman who offered to help him create a CV to find work in the future. After being mistakenly released by HMP Chelmsford just a month after being convicted, before he was eventually recaptured by police, Kebatu was finally deported to Ethiopia in October.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise that many people in Britain now feel deeply anxious over matters of border security and public safety. The countless local protests outside migrant hotels speak to a nation that is furious that the powers-that-be seem to be putting the comfort of young men who have entered the UK illegally above the safety and needs of actual citizens.

As we head into 2026, one can only hope that the concerns of decent, patriotic Brits over immigration are finally taken seriously by the political class. If those in power continue to trivialise and ignore people’s perfectly legitimate worries about illegal migration, they could soon find themselves out of a job. And deservedly so.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.