London: Police have arrested over 27,000 suspected illegal immigrants over the last three years, the latest data published by the Home Office showed.
Despite stringent measures taken by the British government to combat illegal immigration, the statistics showed nearly a 25 per cent increase in arrests between 2013 and 2015.
Many of those held resorted to unimaginable tactics, risking their lives to slip through the borders in pursuit of a better life, officials said.
A majority of them entered the country by secretly clinging onto catamaran ferries at night or by hiding underside of lorries traveling up motorways.
The number of people who died or sustained serious injuries in the process is also on the rise.
The Home Office has been attempting to initiate radical measures in a bid to find a long-term solution to the illegal migration.
The data showed that security forces arrested as many as 7,913 illegal immigrants in 2013. The number rose to 9,600 in 2015, taking the total figures to 27,800 during the past three years.
Apart from this, the number of illegal immigrants caught while trying to sneak across the UK border via France, Belgium and the Netherlands were over 1.5 lakh. Most of them were refugees fleeing violence in countries such as Syria and Afghanistan.
The country is bracing for a possible new influx of refugees as about sixty thousands of migrants live in camps near the port of Calais in France.
Most of these immigrants are, actually, wannabe asylum seekers in the UK. Now that England has voted for Brexit, it has become difficult for the refugees to apply for asylum in the country. This has forced the refugees to break the law to smuggle themselves into the UK.
