BORDER staff have nicked nearly 4,000 migrants working illegally in the UK in just seven months. More than 5,400 businesses have been raided including nail bars, car washes and takeaways. Many of the 3,930 nabbed were small-boat migrants or had overstayed visas. Often they worked cash in hand and in squalid conditions. The firms hiring them face fines of up to £60,000 per worker — and 1,090 civil penalty notices have been issued since last July.
![[Migrants in a small boat crossing the English Channel.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/group-migrants-seen-attempting-crossthe-959760400.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper blasted the rogue bosses and said employers had been able to exploit illegal migrants with impunity for too long. She said this fuelled small-boat crossings leading to “the abuse of vulnerable people, the immigration system and our economy”. The Government, which axed the Tories’ Rwanda deportation plan, faces growing pressure to slash small-boat crossings as support for Reform UK surges.
![[Police officers conducting an immigration raid at a car wash.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/blurred-v1-thouands-illegal-workers-970569021.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
PM Sir Keir Starmer has pinned his hopes on blitzing the people-smuggling gangs but more than 1,000 migrants have crossed the Channel already this year. MPs will today debate the Borders Bill. It would give immigration officers counter-terror style powers to flush out traffickers. FINALLY a crackdown has begun on the shady tax-dodging nail bar, takeaway and car wash businesses and others employing migrants with no right to work here. Great.
But what of those drawn here by the lure of free benefits and cash-in-hand employment in the black economy, and left to live in squalor?. Arrest figures from the Home Office don’t reveal how many, if any, migrants involved have been returned to where they came from and how many are still being accommodated at ruinous cost to the taxpayer. Some 800 deportations have taken place, but that is a fraction of the number who came here just in small boats last year and not even as many as have arrived that way in January alone.
