In July, British Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the U.K. had agreed to pay France roughly $72 million to fund border personnel and equipment that would be used to stop asylum-seekers from crossing the English Channel. The deal came amid a dramatic rise in the number of channel crossings. In the first half of 2021, more than 8,000 asylum-seekers completed the voyage to land on England’s southern shore.
The deal with France was controversial, including within Patel’s own Conservative Party. Noting that this was the second such payment to France in the past year, Tim Loughton, a leading Conservative parliamentarian, asked whether Patel was simply throwing “good money after bad.” Nevertheless, it went ahead and became one of the latest in a string of bilateral deals that has seen a country in the Global North enlist a neighbor’s help in controlling its own borders.