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The problems of Calais, France – which according to the article:

But these days, everyone who comes seems to be going somewhere else. And one reason is that holidaymakers seeking an escape from reality don’t want to stick around in a city full of miserable migrants. City officials place part of the blame on Britain, saying it bears responsibility as the main magnet of the Calais migrants. The mayor says she will seek millions of euros in damages.
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. . . Calais hosts refugee camps in the nearby dunes, wooded areas and near at least one grocery store. The camps started to go up after the 2002 closure of a hangar in nearby Sangatte that housed thousands of migrants.

Mayor Natacha Bouchart managed to get the French government to set up a relief center outside town, where a huge encampment has sprung up. The center provides showers and a daily meal, while reducing migrant traffic in the city.

“The economic lungs of Calais have been extremely affected by this situation,” said Deputy Mayor Emmanuel Agius, adding that the hit to tourism has been particularly bad.
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“Today, we consider we have important financial losses,” said Agius, reiterating Mayor Bouchart’s call for a three-way meeting between herself and the prime ministers of Britain and France. Agius said the mayor wants the summit to be held at the close of summer, with the hope that Calais will be compensated for its losses. She told the French media last week that she would seek 50 million euros.

“The city of Calais has the right to live like any European city,” Agius said, “has the right to develop like any European city.”

. . . The Calais of the 21st century needs British tourists, who account for 20-25 percent of visitors to the Tourism Office, according to its director, Solange Leclerq. But the number took a “dizzying fall” in July to 8 percent. Leclerq blamed the drop not on migrants but on a strike by workers at one of the ferry companies in liquidation that blocked access highways, causing chaos for truckers and travelers.

Let’s see: You make yourself into a Sanctuary City and build a camp, and provide shelter, food and amenities, and wonder why homeless, jobless, skillless migrants from Asia and Africa come there; then, your workers go on strike, really making it place where tourists no longer want to come (as if they needed more reasons to go on holiday elsewhere than Detroit-On-The-Channel); and, accordingly, it must be the fault of another nation that refuses to pay you for the problems you created, or, to take those problems for their own. Or, am I missing something?

wfjag, I agree with your conclusion that France largely created its own problem in Calais. In fact France’s problem is not just Calais. The migrants gathered in Calais managed to cross French borders in the first place.

Yet even with all the apparent concessions France has made to their presence, these migrants don’t want to stay in France. They want into the U.K. And the French do seem to be cooperating with U.K. authorities to prevent that (unlike Mexican authorities as regards migrants crossing the southern U.S. borders.)

So perhaps there’s good reason for U.K. to cooperate a bit more with France regarding the situation in Calais – and perhaps also provided the French begin to show more determination to control migration across their borders in the first place,

The EU could get a handle on this situation by seizing the failed state of Libya (where most of the migrants are sailing from) and conscripting the would -be migrants to hold it, as a place for both relief and gainful employment. Those conscripts demonstrating the most value as soldiers, entrepreneurs, or workers would gain priority access to Europe.

PS: I though it was dumb for us to overthrow Qadhafi when he was the only guy to dismantle a nuclear weapons program. Sort of “moral hazard” in reverse…

The legal term “attractive nuisance” always made me chuckle, thinking of a frisky lover distracting one from completing an important task.

The real irony of all of this is that if you sail a private boat from France to the UK, there is NO immigration control whatsoever on the people on the private boat. You land in a marina and there are signs that say that the “staff and crew” of the boat do not have to go to immigration.

I did this twice, on my own boat, as an American. When we took the commercial ferry or flew from the continent to the UK, we had to do the full UK immigration thing, but when we did it ourselves on our own boat, NOTHING HAD TO BE DONE.

Our cats, on the other hand, had an enormous amount of bureaucracy to process to get in.

@rxc: What the Brits really fear is the threat to their beloved Jellicile Cats by an invasion of French Fleas and cheese.