Already in August, police chief Wim Pieteraerens of Kruibeke said that his officers would not detain migrants heading for the UK and instead only took their fingerprint information before releasing them.
According to Pieteraerens, the situation has further deteriorated, with more migrants arriving and becoming more determined to reach Britain, RTL reported.
“Migrants in transit do not want to stay here and we do not want them either, maybe it’s a bit of a short-term solution, but why do not we let them go to England?” Pieteraerens shrugged.
The migrants prefer the UK to other European countries due to the relative ease of finding undocumented work, the latter being due to the application of habeas corpus laws preventing the checking of migrants’ identification.
Flemish Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration Theo Francken, criticised the police chief, noting that the government had opened a reception centre for migrants in Steenokkerzeel for 200 migrants.
Pieteraerens said that the centre was far too small and added that “there is only room for 10 people when 30 migrants are intercepted, most are released and reappear two days later”.
Migrants trying to reach the United Kingdom have been flooding into Belgium since the dismantling of the infamous Calais Jungle migrant camp in neighbouring France.
Britain is largely repsonsible for the situation since they opted out of the Schengen agreement. Thus the UK is not obligated to eliminate border controls between itself and other EU countries, leading to the accumulation of the migrants in Calais.
Other areas in Belgium have also seen a growth in the number of illegal migrants, like the town of Zeebrugge, where residents complain about delinquency and rising crime and have threatened to take the law into their own hands.
Many of the migrants lack identification or even a legal identity from their countries of origin, as is the case with many people of Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Sudanese nationality. For a person in this situation, no documents can be issued, either because it is unclear to what country the person should be deported, or because neither their countries of origin nor other countries in the Schengen area will accept them.
Hundreds of illegal migrants trying to enter Britain illegally are still massed around Calais. Other smaller, migrant sites exist in France outside Calais; the charity Association Terre d’Errance [Wandering Earth Association] estimates that eleven such camps exist in the northern part of the country.
The group Doctors of the World claim that at least three-quarters of illegals are metally ill. A report by the pro-immigration NGO and France’s Primo Levi Centre revealed that some 64 percent suffered from psycho-traumatic syndromes, diagnosed between 2012 and 2016.