Delegates from more than 40 countries gather in the UK on Monday for a summit to be addressed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer seeking to crackdown on the “vile trade” in migrants.
The interior ministers from France and Germany will be among those attending the two-day Organised Immigration Crime Summit in London, as the UK government struggles to contain migration numbers.
“This vile trade exploits the cracks between our institutions… and profits from our inability at the political level to come together,” Starmer will say Monday in his address, according to a statement shared by the Home Office interior ministry.
But he will insist: “I simply do not believe that organised immigration crime cannot be tackled.”
He will argue resources and intelligence must be shared and that governments need to “tackle the problem upstream at every step of the people smuggling routes”.
Britain’s Home Office is billing the meeting as “the first major international summit in the UK to tackle the global emergency of illegal migration”.
Starmer is due to open and address the meeting to be hosted by his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, which will end on Tuesday.
“We know this is a global criminal industry that is worth billions of pounds, undermining border security and putting lives at risk,” Cooper told the BBC on Sunday.
Representatives from across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and North America, including the United States, are due to attend.
The meeting will focus on how countries can work together to break up organised gangs transporting undocumented migrants across countries, including to Britain from France on small boats.
The summit is designed to build on talks Cooper held in December between her counterparts from Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands.
The five countries signed a joint action plan designed to boost cooperation to take down migrant smuggling gangs.
In attendance will be delegates from countries where smuggling often begins, such as Vietnam and Iraq, as well as from transit countries such as the Balkans.
It will also bring together UK law enforcement chiefs and counterparts from Interpol, Europol and Afripol.
According to the Home Office, representatives will discuss the equipment, infrastructure and fraudulent documents that organised criminal gangs use to smuggle people.
They will also look at how supply routes work and discuss how to tackle the online recruitment of migrants, including with representatives from social media platforms Meta, X and TikTok.
The UK on Sunday announced it was for the first time launching adverts on Zalo, the Vietnamese instant messaging system, to warn people about the dangers of people smugglers.
Vietnamese nationals are among the top nationalities crossing the Channel from northern France to Britain.
Similar campaigns have already been launched in Albania and Iraqi Kurdistan.
UK officials are also keen to speak to China about how it can stop exporting engines and other small boats parts used in crossings.
According to the Home Office, the UK’s National Crime Agency and global law enforcement partners have seized 600 boats and engines since last July.
Starmer is under pressure at home to put an end to the crossings.
The number of migrants arriving in the UK across the Channel set a new record last week for the first three months of the year at more than 6,600.
At least 10 people are dead or missing after attempting the perilous crossing so far this year, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
More than 157,770 migrants have been detected in small boats trying to enter Britain since the government began collecting data in 2018.
In February, the government announced it was toughening immigration rules to make it almost impossible for undocumented migrants who arrive on small boats to later receive citizenship.
On Sunday, it said it would tighten rules to legally require UK gig economy employers to carry out right-to-work checks.
Starmer is under pressure, in part from rising support for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, which won roughly four million votes at July’s general election — an unprecedented haul for a hard-right party.