On 27 November 2021, twenty-seven lives were abandoned to the English Channel by the French and British states, as fifteen calls in distress went unanswered. A year later, Le Monde exposed the exchanges between those on board the small boat and the regional maritime rescue and surveillance centre in the Pas-de-Calais, exchanges which the French state initially denied had taken place. ‘Tu seras pas sauvé…  je t’ai pas demandé de partir’, rang the voice of one operator to the call of distress at sea: ‘You will not be saved… I did not ask you to leave [France]’.

This loss of life at sea, while the worst incident in thirty years in the Channel, in fact fits within a historical continuity of the last twenty years of violent and reactive Franco-British border politics. In this history, the agency of those who have decided to make this perilous journey is deeply constrained: what does choice look like when there is simply ‘no other option’?