Over forty illegal migrants landed in England after taking to sea in boats over the weekend, according to reports.

Tens of thousands of illegal migrants attempt to break into the United Kingdom by forcing their way into Britain-bound lorries, boarding ferries, or storming the Channel Tunnel, but illegal sea crossings of the type seen in Greece, Italy, and Spain were quite rare until recently.

Now, hundreds of boat migrants, often identifying as Iranian, are coming across the narrow straits separating England and France — an advanced, first-world EU member-state — in vessels stolen from fishermen or, more often, in dangerous boats provided by criminal people-smugglers in exchange for significant sums of money.

More than forty such migrants arrived in England over the past weekend; a number on par with some of the shipments of illegal migrants being brought to Italy by supposed “rescue” NGOs which have been making headlines in recent weeks, yet much less prominently reported — perhaps because the British Home Office is not offering the same resistance to the illegal arrivals as Italy’s deputy prime minister and minister of the interior, Matteo Salvini.

Hundreds of Illegal Migrants Pouring Across the English Channel https://t.co/j56e2umONx — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 17, 2019

“Anyone crossing the Channel in a small boat is taking a huge risk with their life and the lives of their children,” warned a Home Office spokesman.

“It is an established principle that those in need of protection should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach and since January more than 40 people who arrived illegally in the UK in small boats have been returned to Europe,” they added — although this figure represents only a small number of total arrivals.

In fact, the EU makes it very difficult for Britain to send illegal boat migrants back to mainland Europe, despite the fact they are clearly in no danger in France, as the bloc’s rules dictate that illegals should not simply be sent back to the last safe member-state they were present in, but the first they arrived in, which often cannot be determined due to lack of a paper trail and the migrants themselves remaining tight-lipped — perhaps unsurprisingly.

Channel Traffickers Brag Migrants ‘Guaranteed’ Residency, UK ‘Never Send You Back’ https://t.co/kqexQ2kTT3 — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 10, 2019

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has previously suggested that the only way to end the Channel crisis is for the British government to stand up to France and the European Union and turn back any and all illegal migrant boats, as the Australians did in response to a similar crisis in the Pacific with great success.

“All anybody knows for certain is that several hundred people have crossed the Channel and made it to Britain since November… how can we really know who they are or what their true motivation for coming to the UK is?” the veteran MEP warned.

“Anybody who disagrees with me might like to recall that five of the eight terrorists who murdered 130 people and injured another 413 people in Paris in November 2015 entered the EU illegally via the Mediterranean… [Islamic State] itself has said it would exploit the migrant crisis to flood our continent with half a million Islamic extremists.”

Farage: UK Must ‘Stand Up to EU and France’ to End Channel Migrant Crisis https://t.co/rKpqYUOPgK — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 30, 2018

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery