Wearing a clean dress and pink socks as she waits patiently to be smuggled across the Channel to England, Kidan Tedros is the youngest child at the Calais camp where African migrants armed with guns, flick-knives and iron bars rioted this week.

The four-year-old is sitting on a wall by the refugee camp which is spread over sand dunes and the base for 1,300 Eritrean and Sudanese who try, night after night, to jump on lorries where they can hide and be taken illegally on ferries sailing to Dover.

The little girl arrived in Calais three weeks ago with her mother, Laula, 40, after travelling at least 3,200 miles from Eritrea, a country in north-east Africa which is run by a ruthless dictator. Terrified, they watched when this week’s riot broke out and French police moved in to quell the violence and fired rubber bullets.

Violence erupts as some of the 1200 migrants said to be in Calais waiting to get to the UK, queue for charity food handouts

Fifty migrants were injured and one was shot in the head by an air-gun as Eritreans and Sudanese battled over which of the two nationalities should get better access to lorries heading to England.

Laula held her daughter’s hand tightly as, speaking through an interpreter, she told me: ‘We have travelled for three months — by lorry, boat, bus and train — to get here. It took four days to cross the Sahara in a truck to reach Libya.

‘The heat was so intense that we nearly fainted and it was a struggle to survive.’

Laula’s family had paid an agent in Eritrea to get them across the Sahara and then another people-trafficking fixer to obtain two places on a boat from Libya to Italy. They are likely to have to find more money to pay a third agent to help mother and daughter make the final stage of their journey to England — illegally in the back of a lorry. Laula and Kidan are typical of the hundreds of thousands of people who form the gigantic diaspora from the remotest parts of Africa to Europe.

Wearing a clean dress and pink socks as she waits patiently to be smuggled across the Channel to England, Kidan Tedros is the youngest child at the Calais camp

This mass exodus of desperate peoples from war-ravaged, religiously divided and impoverished countries on the giant continent — as well as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt — poses a disturbing immigration problem for Britain.

Of course, this isn’t a new issue. Twelve years ago, our government agreed a deal with France to close the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais because it had become a magnet for illegal immigrants. Labour politicians promised the days of ‘soft touch’ Britain were over.

Yet as today’s Biblical scenes of human suffering show, the problem is getting worse. Indeed, it has been compounded by this week’s mischievous call by Calais’s deputy mayor for the refugees to be given ferry tickets to Britain and for the scrapping of the arrangement under which the UK’s border controls officially begin at Calais, rather than Dover.

This, he suggested, could happen for an experimental month so that the UK Government might comprehend the pressure Calais is under.

Meanwhile, the number of migrants arriving in Italy (en route to England and France) is rising daily. So far this year, 91,000 Africans have landed at Lampedusa, a rocky tourist island off the southern tip of Italy (the nearest European point to Libya), or after being rescued at sea by the Italian navy (EU rules say member countries have a duty to rescue migrants in their waters if they are in distress).

Migrants and activists scuffle with policemen after French authorities started to clear out makeshift camps in the city of Calais, northern France, housing hundreds of illegal migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa

Numbers are far higher than in the same period last year and are expected to reach 100,000 by the end of August. In just 24 hours, between Wednesday and Thursday this week, 2,500 Africans, Syrians and Egyptians landed in Italy.

Like those before them, the latest arrivals are sent to immigration holding camps, which are already full to bursting, while their asylum claims are processed.

But few will stay for more than a night’s rest, a shower and a hot meal. Inevitably, they want to move on and exploit the EU’s open- borders policy.

Britain is their favoured destination. Mekki Ali, a legal expert from Sudan who advises migrants in Calais, explained: ‘If they go to France, it is difficult to get asylum because the rules are tough. So they dream of making a home in England. They think it is best for education, for welfare and to get work.’

Three migrants board lorry trailer in full view of motorists stopped in traffic near Calais. The lorry driver and two gendarmes investigate

Calais deputy mayor Philippe Mignonet concurs, saying: ‘Our port is the point of exit because it’s the shortest route to the magnet country, England.

‘The Italians have said that they can’t cope with the numbers, and neither can we in Calais.’

He has called on David Cameron to visit Calais to ‘see the reality of what we are dealing with’.

He explained that there is a sophisticated mafia which runs people-smuggling gangs who make many millions of euros out of the migrants, adding: ‘No one in London seems to care.’

It was a decade ago when the Italian authorities first became worried by what began as a small, yet constant, stream of African migrants. The trickle threatened to become a torrent when Libya’s then dictator Colonel Gaddafi promised to ‘turn Europe black’ (in other words, allow countless numbers to migrate from across Africa via Libya) unless the excesses of his regime were overlooked by EU governments.

‘There are millions of Africans waiting to get into Europe,’ Gaddafi said. ‘We don’t know what the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans will be when faced with this influx of people. Tomorrow, Europe may no longer be European.’

French policemen talk to a migrant in Calais as tensions remain high following overnight clashes between rival groups waiting to try to cross the Channel to England

Not surprisingly, EU leaders appeased Gaddafi. In return, he helped to stem the tide of illegal immigrants to Lampedusa. He sent police to patrol Libyan beaches, impounded boats, arrested trafficking agents and did much to halt the migrant trade. The result?

In the first four months of 2010, only 27 would-be asylum-seekers arrived at the island by sea.

However, with the fall of Gaddafi three years ago and the descent of Libya into lawlessness and civil war, the floodgates have opened again. The bitter truth is that the large sums of money paid to people-smuggling gangs help to finance the rebel militia groups in the country.

The main hub of the migrant trade is Zuwara, a port city in north-west Libya, where traffickers operate with impunity. One recently told a journalist for a Middle Eastern publication that business has never been so brisk. Each boat journey across the sea to Lampedusa reaps a trafficker £150,000, and there is an endless demand from migrants begging for each £580 place on board.

Thus we are now witnessing huge numbers of people in camps in Calais. Every Eritrean, Sudanese, Syrian, and Egyptian migrant I spoke to here this week had made the treacherous boat journey to the Italian island of Lampedusa from Libya after paying a trafficking agent.

Also, right along the French northern coast, there are other migrants living in makeshift camps around Calais who have travelled to be close to the ferry port.

At one, I discovered three Iranians in their 20s who have pitched a tent beside a lake. They left their homeland by climbing through the mountains into eastern Turkey, then travelling to Greece and on through Italy to France.

They told me they had paid £1,500 to an Iranian people-trafficker who lives in London.

Abdi, 28, said: ‘He told us to put the money in his bank account and has guaranteed us a place on a lorry. Our families paid the money direct.’

The trio’s first attempt to get onto an England-bound lorry in Calais failed when it was searched at the harbour. They were arrested by French police and held for a few days before being released.

Migrants walk on a railway in Calais. Dozens were hurt after clashes broke out between hundreds of Africans

Abdi says: ‘We are trying again. The Iranian agent promises he will get us to England very soon.’ In Calais itself, I talk to migrants who, every evening, get supper from a charity-run feeding centre. A typical meal is a bowl of pasta, a banana and bottle of water. This week it has never been so busy — with up to 800 people turning up nightly. One of the staff said: ‘There are more coming than ever before. We are worried we might run out of food.

‘We know that there are another 400 or 500 other migrants who do not come to eat each evening because they are sleeping so that they will be fresh to climb on the lorries going to England during the night.’

The French authorities believe that up to 250 migrants successfully smuggle themselves to Britain every week. That means a total of more than 12,000 a year.

As one Eritrean migrant at the feeding centre told me with a grin: ‘We would not be in Calais if we had no success in getting to England.’

He said that they were not put off by British border police using heat-seeking equipment to try to find bodies hiding on lorries.

‘What scares us, though, is the sniffer dogs. If those animals are put in the lorry, people are always discovered,’ he added.

Ttensions remain high following overnight clashes between rival groups waiting to try to cross the Channel

An insight into the reasons why so many favour Britain over France came recently when a group of migrants living in a disused building in Calais explained on the internet why they had left their own countries and wanted to live in England.

Their posting said: ‘We ran away because of injustice, war, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing, poverty, arbitrary imprisonment and religious persecution which prevents us living as we want: for instance, in the Sudan, if you drink a beer you can be whipped 40 times.’

‘If we ask for asylum in France, they make us wait in the streets. In England . . . they give us a house, we have access to a school, to proper food and a dignified life. We want France to give us good living conditions, and if they can’t do this, they have to open the borders and let people go to England.’

It is a view shared by Laula, the mother of Kidan, who is waiting in Calais in the hope of starting a new life in England with her four-year-old daughter.

She said: ‘I want her to have an education. She also needs help from your hospitals because she has asthma and a back problem.

‘We do not want to stay in France or claim asylum here because England is better. We cannot wait for the day to come when we succeed in getting over the Channel.’