In the countryside of England’s East Midlands, less than a mile from the house where I spent my childhood, there is a small, wooded area named Hunsbury Hill. The actual hill, as I remember it, is a slight thing among the trees: its top flattened off and surrounded by a circular ditch eight or ten feet deep. Back in those days when kids were let loose to find their own fun, it was a popular play spot for us urchins from the nearby public housing estate.

Local people never said “Hunsbury Hill.” They called the place “Danes’ Camp” because Viking invaders—“Danes”—had used it as a base in their razzia through Eastern England around A.D. 900, the one that Alfred the Great and his children finally suppressed. The strategic geographical feature has a much older history: it was used as a hill fort by the Celts in the centuries B.C. It was those “Danes” that had stuck in people’s minds, though. Country folk have long memories, but with limits.

The Vikings were young men seeking plunder and women. They came armed into a settled population of Saxons that were likewise armed and under the leadership of brilliant and energetic monarchs.

The seaborne invaders of England today—36,816 in 2024, up from 29,437 the year before, according to the United Nations—are likewise young men seeking plunder and women, but this time unarmed. However, the English people they are settling amongst are also unarmed and are under the leadership of flaccid clerks who regard their ancestors with shame.

I am writing here of the boat people being smuggled across the English Channel from France. More than 150,000 have arrived since 2018, when numbers were first recorded. All but the merest trickle of that number have landed this past five years since Brexit came into force on the last day of January 2020.

Prior to that, Britain could, under EU rules, return the invaders to France. As an independent nation, however, maritime law forbids Britain from undertaking such action unilaterally without the prior agreement of France. Such agreement is not, of course, forthcoming.

So the British authorities meekly bring the invaders ashore and permit them to apply for asylum from the horrors of ethnic, religious, and political oppression … in France, whence they embarked.

Pollsters report that a prime reason for the success of the 2016 Brexit referendum was a widespread desire among ordinary British people for major reductions in immigration. It is a bitter irony that Brexit helped deliver the opposite—doubling net migration numbers to 750,000 in 2022 from 375,000 in 2015, according to the UK Office for National Statistics.

Isn’t there a key difference here between the Channel boat people and the Vikings of A.D. 900? Those latter were of a single ethnicity: Scandinavian. Today’s invaders come from all over, with nothing cultural in common, right?

Eh, not precisely. The 2024 statistics for Channel-crossers show Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and Vietnam way out ahead as nations of origin, closely followed by Eritrea, Iraq, Turkey, and Sudan. Vietnam is a single and peculiar case. Roughly half of Eritreans are Muslims. The other nations are all majority Muslim.

So the Channel-crossers are a swelling reinforcement for Britain’s growing Muslim problem. (I would not be able to publish that sentence in Britain; to post it online would quite probably get me a jail sentence. Thank Heaven, and America’s Founding Fathers, for the First Amendment!)

How, then, should Britain deal with the Channel boat people?

A reasonable approach would be to shoot them on sight and sink their boats. There would be nothing outrageous about that; it is common practice elsewhere. Saudi Arabia shoots border jumpers, sometimes wholesale: several hundred in one 2023 episode. So does Israel; so, I am sure, do many other countries. Why should Britain not likewise defend her borders with force?

Well, things are somewhat different for an island nation. What looks like a boat full of alien invaders might, in fact, be recreational native mariners out for a lark or blown off-course. Under nautical conditions, it’s sometimes hard to be sure.

If blunt force is ruled out, the Bukele option might be worth a try. Faced with a problem of street gangs, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele built, from scratch in just a few months, CECOT, one of the world’s largest prisons, with cells for 40,000 prisoners. Since he began populating it, his country’s homicide rate has declined by an order of magnitude.

Surely the UK, with 11 times El Salvador’s population and 50 times her gross domestic product, could easily accomplish something comparable. Then boat people, when they landed, instead of being handed cellphones, health-insurance cards, and accommodations at comfortable hotels, could—after first having had their absurd “asylum” claims dismissed—be jailed for breaking immigration laws.

Their sentences served, they could be deported to their home countries. If the home country is not known—boat people commonly discard their identity documents mid-Channel—or for some reason will not accept deportees, the offender could stay incarcerated indefinitely pending self-deportation.

These are stern measures; but just the knowledge of them, once abroad, would be a great discouragement, doing to illegal immigration what President Bukele did to El Salvador’s homicide rate.

I am dreaming, of course. The people of the 21st-century West have no stomach for stern measures. We would rather give up our nations. Somewhere up above, Alfred the Great is quietly weeping. ◆