Yasin pulls out his iPhone to show me a video. There are about twenty people packed into a small dinghy as it races across the water. It could be a group of mates at a water park, but this was his illegal crossing from Turkey to Greece. Beneath us, there are around eighty Brits milling around, who have cycled from London with Critical Mass: Bikes Beyond Borders to donate bicycles, tents and other supplies for the roughly three-thousand people living in the camp.
New arrivals in the Jungle. Photo by Ricardo Miguel Vieira. When you leave the channel ferry port, you can choose to turn right into Calais town centre or on to holidays in the idyllic French countryside. Over the last few years, various incarnations of the Jungle have appeared around the Calais outskirts, only to be razed by police. The council opened the small Jules Ferry camp for women and children earlier this year, but everyone else is left to make do with flimsy tents and rag-tag wooden shelters in the sand dunes.
Their English is limited, but they flick through the mag, looking at the pictures before both seizing on a photo of artist and train-hopper Bill Daniel scaling a barbed wire fence. They pull up their sleeves to show me the scars across their hands and wrists from the razor wire around the Eurotunnel terminal, ten kilometres away on the other side of town, where thousands have attempted to stow away on trains bound for the UK this summer.
Yasin looks out across the camp. Photo by Alex King. For all the media coverage the Jungle has attracted, the three-thousand people here represent a tiny fraction of the global refugee crisis. Most come from countries wracked by war, whose nationals are mostly considered to qualify for refugee status. A majority in the Jungle are aiming for Britain, but growing numbers are applying for asylum in France as security at the port and Eurotunnel terminal are beefed up.
There are 13 million refugees worldwide, according to the latest figures from the UNHCR , of which countries in the developing world have absorbed 86 percent. Two-hundred thousand people are believed to have entered Europe so far in , however, the UK is only the sixth-greatest recipient of asylum applications, which falls to 19th when judged on per-capita terms.
