Migrant crisis divides Europe

The plaintive notes of a love song came from the dusty mountains of Kurdistan. But they were carried on a stiff sea breeze off the English Channel.

Suran, a 17 year-old from northern Iraq, who preferred not to use his last name, was singing to himself as he stood alone outside a refugee center here. He was waiting for night to fall, so he could make another attempt to sneak through the Channel tunnel, two miles away, into Britain.

He, and 1,700 other illegal immigrants living in a gigantic hangar run by the Red Cross, are at the flashpoint of a row between Britain and France over asylum seekers. Like the boatload of Afghans who tried to get into Australia last week, Suran's predicament also illustrates a global immigration crisis. Here, the differences in European asylum policies are being tested by 390,000 applicants a year - 10 times the US rate.

Matters have come to a head at the mouth of the 20-mile-long tunnel, because tighter security on other routes has encouraged more and more desperate migrants to try the trains that run every few minutes under the sea. Night after night, scores, sometimes hundreds, of them break through the razor-wire fence around the tunnel terminal. They risk their lives by trying to jump onto moving trains or hide in trucks.

The British government wants the French authorities to move the Red Cross camp further from the tunnel entrance. The French government has refused, and announced this week it would open a string of other centers in northern France to take the strain off Sangatte, where 1,700 people - almost all single young men - live in a space designed for 600.

Most of them are from Afghanistan and Iraq, though Iranians, Somalis, Sri Lankans and other nationalities are sheltering at this staging post, too. They have made perilous and expensive treks halfway across the world to flee war and poverty and to seek a new future, like the hundreds of Afghans recently stranded in the Indian Ocean for more than a week.

"The Taleban take me in the war", said Zalme, a medical student (who wished to be identified by his first name). His father had paid smugglers $5,000 to get him to Europe. "I want to be a doctor. In Afghanistan. I would not be a doctor, I would be in my grave."

Zalme left his home in Jalalabad with two cousins in early June, making his way to neighboring Pakistan and then by plane, car, truck and foot across the Middle East and Europe, being handed from one smuggler to another. Four days ago, he was put on a train to the port of Calais, and finally took a taxi to the camp at Sangatte.

Twice since then, he and his cousins have joined the refugees who leave camp each night for the tunnel terminal. Both times they were caught by the police, who brought them back. Zalme wants to go to England, rather than elsewhere in Europe, he said, because he speaks some English, "and they don't deport you from England."

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