68 migrants found inside four lorries in Essex
68 migrants, including two pregnant women and 15 children, were found on Thursday night inside four lorries at Harwich International Port.
The container, containing 35 people from Afghanistan, 22 from China, 10 from Vietnam and one from Russia, arrived in the country on a Stena Line ferry from the Netherlands, and was discovered during a routine inspection.
Seven of them including both pregnant women, had to be taken to the hospital, although none of them were in a “life-threatening or serious condition”.
"With the numbers being over 60, we launched our full major incident plan and sent resources including our hazardous areas response team so we could ensure that all those people were thoroughly medically checked," Matthew Broad, a spokesman for the East of England ambulance service said.
Broad said the service had experience dealing with this in Essex, but pointed out they were concerned about the length of time they had been in there.
As a consequence, four Polish drivers were arrested by the British police, Home Office said.
Essex, migrant destination of the “carousel system”
The route between Holland and Essex has been described as a 'carousel system' for immigrants who come to Britain. Two Albanian immigrants died in February last year. They jumped off a passenger ferry into the sea after being deported from Harwich, which they had reached by ferry.
In August 2014, 35 immigrants were discovered at Tilbuyry Docks, one of them dead.
UK faces migration problems
The UK's net migration hit a ten-year high of 318,000 in 2014, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
These figures came despite Prime Minister David Cameron's pledge before the election to reduce the number of migrants to around 100,000.
Read more: Migration to the UK rises despite Cameron's target to reduce it
The country received 25,020 asylum applications in the last year, an increase of 5% compared with the previous 12 months, when figures stood at 23,803. The largest number of applications for asylum came from nationals of Eritrea (3,552), followed by Pakistan (2,421) and Syria (2,222).
Think-tank Migration Watch UK said that a new home must be built every seven minutes for new migrants for the next 20 years or so.
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