Channel Crossings Project Final Report

Posted on 5 November 2025

The Channel Crossings Project is a three year ESRC funded collaborative research project involving staff at the Universities of York, Liverpool, Nottingham and Sheffield.

The project explores government responses to the movement of people across the English Channel in ‘small boats’. Small boat crossings have become a contemporary ‘spectacle’ and constructed as a moral panic by successive British governments (both Labour and Conservative). The depiction of so-called ‘illegal’ movement across Britain's maritime borders has further opened up political space for far right parties, street violence and authoritarian political projects to gain traction through forms of racist nationalism and anti-immigrationism. This has laid the groundwork for attacks on rights to asylum exemplified in the Illegal Migration Bill and the now failed UK-Rwanda partnership. Automatic detention and deportation, the criminalisation of people steering vessels, investment in policing in France and technologies to monitor the Channel, have all expanded in attempts to ‘stop the boats’. 152 people have died in the Channel since 2018, with the death toll rising alongside increasingly restrictive border and policing measures.

The Channel Crossings Project aims to situate government responses to small boats in the wider political, socio-economic and historical context - investigating the securitisation of the UK-France borderzone, the colonial and imperial forces that shape mobility and border controls and the material politics of asylum in Britain today.

It equally explores what it means to resist hostile border regimes and anti-migrant policy and politics. Based on an analysis of 245 policy texts (1961-2025), 81 interviews with policy elites, NGOs and people with experience of crossing the Channel to claim asylum and a database of 217 Home Office contracts, this final report sets out the project’s key findings and a range of policy alternatives to restrictive and violent border regimes.

You can find further information regarding the Channel Crossings project, media outputs and academic publications on their website.

The Channel Crossings research team are: Joe Turner (Department of Politics and International Relations/MigNet, University of York), Tesfalem Habte Yemane, Arshad Isakjee, Thom Davies, Lucy Mayblin, Haleemah Alaydi, Asma Malik, Zeraslasie Redie Shiker, Yagoub Hamdan Matar and Bushra Manochehry.