A prolific Vietnamese people smuggler, who entered the UK illegally this year in a small boat, has said he forges visa documents for other Vietnamese who plan to make the same crossing, the BBC reports.
As reported, the man, whom the BBC is calling Thanh, is now claiming UK asylum and claimed he has spent almost 20 years - his entire adult life - in the smuggling industry. He has been in prison, led a gang working on the northern coast of France, and claims to have helped more than 1,000 people to risk their lives to cross the Channel.
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"The self-confessed criminal met the BBC at a secret location to share detailed information about the mechanics of the international smuggling industry,” it is reported.
‘A very lucrative business’
As noted, Vietnam emerged in the first months of this year - suddenly and unexpectedly - as the largest single source of migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats. Many Vietnamese migrants cited failing businesses and debts at home for their decision to seek work in the UK. Their first step, experts have suggested, is often to access Europe by taking advantage of a legal work visa system in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe. This is where Thanh’s forgery operation comes in, he says. He helps create the fake paperwork needed to get the legitimate work visas.
"I can’t justify breaking the law. But it’s a very lucrative business,” Thanh said calmly, insisting he doesn’t provide forgeries for people seeking UK visas.
The BBC reported that people pay between $15,000 (£11,570) and $20,000 (£15,470) to travel from Vietnam to mainland Europe and then to cross the Channel.
"It is a dangerous business. More than 50 people have been killed crossing the Channel in small boats already this year, making 2024 the deadliest on record. For the first time, the figures include one Vietnamese. When our team first made contact with Thanh in mainland Europe earlier this year, we knew he was going to attempt to get to the UK with other Vietnamese. He later let us know he had crossed the Channel from northern France, in a small boat,” reads the BBC story.
"Thanh told us he had first flown from Vietnam to Hungary on a legitimate visa - although he had acquired it using forged documents.”
He had then flown on to Paris and stayed for a few days in a "safe house”, organised by a Vietnamese smuggling gang on the city’s outskirts. Soon after then, he was taken in a group by minibus to the coast and, finally, put in the hands of one of the Kurdish gangs that control the small boat crossings, it is noted.
"Once you’re on the boat, you get treated like everyone else,” he said. "It’s overcrowded.”
The Vietnamese passengers pay three or four times more money to the gangs handling the crossing routes, "so we get the advantage of being given a place more quickly”.
As noted, the journey Thanh described is now an established route from Vietnam to the UK - a path heavily promoted by smugglers on Facebook, who charge clients for forged documents, flights, buses, and a place on a flimsy rubber boat. Payment for a successful Channel crossing is only made after arrival in the UK.
Thanh asked for asylum when he was interviewed by a British immigration official - explaining he had left Vietnam because he had got into debt to gangsters when his business failed. His life, he said, was in danger. He told the official he had been trafficked to the UK in order to work for a gang to pay off his debt.
The BBC, as noted, heard similar stories from the Vietnamese encountered in northern France.
"When we first established contact with Thanh, he portrayed himself as a desperate migrant, first stuck in France, and then trapped in the UK’s asylum system, living in a crowded hotel, unable to work, and waiting to learn his fate.”
But over time, the BBC team began to learn the truth as Thanh began to reveal the extent to which his extraordinary life story has been built on a series of elaborate, even outrageous, lies.
Thanh admitted that he had not been trafficked to the UK but had made up that story as part of his asylum claim. And he went much further, it is noted, claiming that all the Vietnamese migrants he knew of had been told to offer a version of the same lie.
"Yes. A lie. I was not trafficked,” he said.
Migration experts and NGOs have a range of views about the scale of trafficking from Vietnam.
A French prosecutor told the BBC, it is noted, that many Vietnamese were in debt to the smugglers and ended up working in UK cannabis farms. But he played down the idea of an organised supply chain, insisting the smuggling system was more like a haphazard series of stepping stones, with each stage controlled by separate gangs. Finding work in the UK was, he said, about luck and opportunism.
Other experts insist that many, if not most, Vietnamese migrants are victims of trafficking, and that those being taken across the Channel are in fact a cheap and easy source of labour for criminal gangs in the UK. A government registry of people suspected of being victims of modern slavery has consistently shown a high number of Vietnamese.
"It is often not possible, or helpful, to differentiate when a person has been trafficked or smuggled, especially as exploitation can happen at any time,” said Jamie Fookes, UK and Europe advocacy manager at Anti-Slavery International.
"Those crossing will often have to pay either through extortion, or from being exploited in some form of forced labour or criminality on the other side.”