Migrants undeterred after tragedy on English Channel

The lights on the opposite side of the English Channel were visible Thursday, emboldening Emanuel Malbah, an asylum-seeker who has been living in a makeshift camp on France’s northern coastline for the past week, dreaming of making a crossing.

Just a thin waterway separates Malbah, 16, and other migrants from their goal after long journeys across Europe from homes they fled in the Mideast and Africa. But the narrowness of the passage is deceptive, as was made clear Wednesday when at least 27 people died in a failed attempt to cross the channel aboard a flimsy inflatable boat.

Despite the deaths — the disaster was one of the deadliest involving migrants in Europe in recent years — people were still waiting Thursday for the right time to dash out of the woods with their own boats and make a break for the beach.

In recent months, the number of migrants setting off into the channel has soared because authorities have cracked down on other routes to England.

Prompted by the tragedy at sea a day earlier, French and British leaders vowed to crack down on migrant crossings of the channel that separates their two countries, blaming organized smuggling rings and also one another.

On Thursday, French officials confirmed that children and a pregnant woman were among those who had drowned, while crews worked in the cold and wind to recover bodies and to try to identify the dead.

Two survivors were taken to a French hospital, where they were being treated for severe hypothermia.

Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said authorities believed about 30 people had been crowded onto a vessel that he compared to “a pool you blow up in your garden.”