Albanian Migrants Discover New Smuggling Route to UK

A new migrant route has emerged with gangs offering to smuggle people in lorries from Spain to Portsmouth.

Albanian people smugglers are providing passage from Santander on the north coast of Spain to the south coast port of Portsmouth for £14,000 per person as an alternative to small boats and to avoid the improved border security for those travelling via ferry and Eurostar from northern France.

The cost is four times the £3,000 to £3,500 charged by people smugglers to cross on small boats but the route is less dangerous and, if successful, migrants are less likely to be picked up, identified and deported back to Albania.

Migrants crossing the Channel on dinghies are taken by Border Force for processing by immigration officials at Manston near Dover with the prospect of being deported back to Albania under a “fast-track” returns deal agreed last year between the two countries.

“If they arrive on a small boat, they know that they are likely to be sent back to Albania,” said an immigration investigator familiar with the trade.

“They know their asylum claim will be refused so they don’t register with the Home Office. In order to pay the huge sum of money for getting into the UK, many get involved in cannabis farms.”

The route is advertised on social media including TikTok using icons, emojis and images of lorries, ferries and sites in the capital, including the London Eye.

An increase in the number of illegal migrants attempting to enter the UK via Portsmouth and Poole has already been reported by the UK borders and immigration watchdog.

“The numbers detected at Portsmouth and Poole suggested some displacement of irregular migrants looking to enter the UK clandestinely to Normandy and Spain, following improvements to port security at Calais, Coquelles and Dunkirk,” said the inspectorate.

The number of Albanians crossing the Channel on small boats fell significantly in the first five months of this year to two per cent of arrivals, down from 28 per cent last year when a record 45,755 migrants in total reached the UK across the Dover straits last year.

However, the National Crime Agency (NCA) says the attraction of the grey economy, where migrants can earn up to £100 a day in construction, hospitality, car washes or as a barber, or £1,000 a week as a “gardener” in a cannabis farm is “pretty overwhelming” for poorer Albanians.

Some, he said, were brought over to work in indoor cannabis groves, where Albanians have usurped the Vietnamese as kingpins in production of the drug, with their passage across the Channel in small boats paid for by the gangs. They are then “debt bonded” to repay their crossing fee by working in the farms or for the gangs.

Last year, the NCA estimated that hundreds of millions of pounds was being sent back to Albania with the sum increasing by a fifth in the past five years. It disclosed it had 70 live immigration investigations under way of which a “significant proportion” were linked to Albanian organised crime groups.

Recent cases have included a 22-year-old who was jailed for eight months after agreeing to tend more than 400 cannabis plants to pay off his debt to a people-smuggling gang. Another 19-year-old was jailed for 20 months for cultivating 52 cannabis plants after being caught within eight days of his arrival in the UK in a lorry.

TikTok said it had closed down the accounts. TikTok, Facebook and Twitter have all signed up to an initiative in which they have pledged to increase cooperation with the NCA to find and remove the criminal content.