His face obscured by a Covid mask, the small man stands among throngs of migrants near a dense forest in Dunkirk.
He is 30 years old and watches quietly as the French police dismantle a nearby shanty camp where thousands have waited this year to get on boats from northern French beaches to Britain.
‘It is easy for these people to reach the UK,’ he boasts to me in perfect English, even though he is an Iraqi Kurd. ‘All you need is money. The more you have, the easier it is.
‘The police can pull down the camps, but the migrants will hide in the forest and then come out to catch boats across the sea.’
The shadowy figure is a people trafficker who spoke to me last week on condition of anonymity.
A migrant casually puffs a cigarette after a safe crossing – but really he’s a trafficker actor in a video shot in France to advertise smuggling gangs
Our conversation took place as the Mail established that rival people smuggling gangs are posting videos online to compete for business – using actors to play migrants ‘crossing’ to the UK.
The man in the Covid mask is a key player in one of Dunkirk’s ten gangs which, with ruthless efficiency enforced by guns, organise the never-ending migrant flow to the UK’s south coast.
He owns a Dunkirk restaurant and has settled in France. But he travels to the UK regularly, he says, to see his extended family in London where he came to live at 18 as an asylum seeker.
‘What is wrong with us sending migrants going to the UK?’ he asks me boldly. ‘Britain needs more workers and we Iraqi Kurds work hard.’
Traffickers have gained the upper hand here. They run rings around the French police and are not afraid of anyone. Which is why the man I met last Thursday was prepared to speak to me so openly even though I am a journalist.
Yet they are dangerous characters. They push migrants who dither on to boats at gunpoint. Their gangs fight each other over the control of the boat crossings which make them millions.
They are at the root of what Home Secretary Priti Patel last week admitted is a ‘migration crisis’.
One that a prominent but anonymous Tory party donor warned this weekend could destroy the Government, as a new poll showed 77 per cent of Tory voters say its approach is too soft.
The traffickers know there is insatiable demand for passages on their boats. They are pushing at an open door. On Friday, the former chief immigration officer for UK Border Force, Kevin Saunders, explained that migrants ‘know they’ve won the jackpot’ when they reach Britain.
‘The biggest draw is these people know everything in the United Kingdom is free, they are going to get education, medical treatment, money, accommodation.'
What's more, he added, they ‘know that they're not going to be removed, this is why they destroy all their documentation (in the Channel in sight of Dover)’.
Trafficker boat of choice: Eighteen grey dinghies, like the one in the video, in a Kent warehouse after being seized
The traffickers compete violently for customers to smuggle across the world, slip into Europe, and bring to Dunkirk beaches from where 24,000 – hundreds this weekend alone – have embarked this year.
A video showing migrants how easy it is to sail to the UK unchallenged is on the social media site TikTok. Incredibly, it was made by traffickers to ramp up their trade.
With supreme confidence, six men – one puffing casually on a cigarette – step out of a people smugglers’ dinghy on to a beach, disappearing along a sea wall for a new life in Britain.
The video is accompanied by a jaunty soundtrack of a popular Kurdish song which includes the lyrics: ‘We are here, we did not die.’
That, at least, is the happy scenario the video-makers want those watching it to believe. In fact, the film was faked. It was shot not on the Kent coast but on the outskirts of Dunkirk, with its distinctive skyline of three large liquefied natural gas storage tanks near a tall lighthouse.
And the men in the video who step out of the inflatable, left behind bobbing on the sea, are trafficker actors – not migrants reaching the UK.
‘The smugglers made it as a “come-on” advertisement to migrants,’ explains an immigration expert who advises the Government.
‘It sends a message that it is easy to cross the Channel, disappear into the UK, and the sea journey is safe.’
Tellingly, the two-tone grey dinghy in the video has a colour and design which link it to a Dunkirk-based Kurdish Iraqi smuggling gang that uses it routinely for crossings. The inflatable is
