Britain’s migrant invasion that wasn’t

AS BRITAIN SWELTERED in a heatwave—or, as most Europeans would describe it, summer—Priti Patel was far from the only Londoner to go southwards in search of sea air. But the home secretary’s outing, on August 10th, was hardly a jolly. Her day was full of pow-wows with border guards, not of ice cream and sandcastles. In Dover she clambered aboard a police vessel named Invicta and conferred with officials, a latter-day Boudicca inspecting her troops.

A steady trickle of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel in dinghies from camps in Calais has inspired a sea of tabloid headlines. Nigel Farage, a loudmouth Brexiteer, made hay. Tory MPs joined in, too: Natalie Elphicke, who represents Dover, accused incomers of “breaking into our country”; a group of 25 members of the parliamentary party saw not bedraggled groups of people desperate enough to risk drowning but hordes of “invading migrants”. Ms Patel’s trip to the seaside was an attempt to placate such critics. “Ministers want to get it off the front page of the Daily Mail,” says David Wood, a former head of immigration enforcement at the Home Office.

Populists in the media and Parliament make much of a steep rise in such crossings, from about 2,000 last year to 4,000 or so this year, according to an unofficial tally...