Crashing Britain’s gates A TINY African girl breaks into a jig as an Arabic pop song gives way to the cheerful soul of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy”, scourge of parents everywhere. It is an incongruous sound for the Jungle, a squalid migrant camp on the outskirts of Calais. But the Jungle is an incongruous place: a shanty-town of thousands of the earth’s wretched, assembled with the tacit approval of local authorities in one of the richest parts of the planet. “You’re telling me this is Europe?” says a frustrated Syrian teenager, gesturing at the filth before him.
Along with most of the Jungle’s inhabitants, he has his eyes on Britain, across the English Channel. A recent spike in the number of migrants in Calais attempting to clamber onto trains or lorries bound for Britain has spooked politicians on both sides of the water. Fences have been erected and extra police dispatched. A dozen migrants have died attempting to make the crossing since June. For some, Calais is a microcosm of the migration crisis that has erupted across Europe this year, from Greek islands to Hungary’s border with Serbia. (In the latest disaster,…
