If someone in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway etc. is being persecuted and feels genuine fear for their live... yes, I can see why they might attempt to enter England without applying in advance.
But people paying criminal gangs, and travelling through many safe countries beforehand? Nope.
The hardest part is escaping your country of origin, with your life.
If you are being persecuted, liable to be killed or tortured, your own government (or whatever authority there is) will prevent you from leaving.
You don'r ask for permission to leave because it would be refused, and you'd probably be arrested, tortured or killed.
So you leave surreptitiously, often without any documentation. Often it isn't possible to obtain any documentation because any government is simply not functioning.
For example, duriing the 'boat' exodus from Vietnam, Cambodia, etc, there was no functioning government or authority. If caught you were simply arrested (or shot on sight) by the army (or the enemy) and imprisoned without charge, without access to legal advice or even any sense of a trial.
Once you have managed to escape, you have a choice of which country you wish to claim asylum. That's written into the UN Convention.
You can pass through as many countries as you wish to arrive at your country of choice. It isn't possible to take a plane, a train, a boat, etc because you have no travel documents.
If you go to a refugee camp, you'll have to endure the inhuman conditions there, little access to medical assistance, open to criminal activity, subjected to unfair treatment. And if one day you are selected for transfer to another country, you have no choice of when nor where, nor why.
Zoe Gardner gave an excellent explanation to the Committee on why asylum seekers choose where to apply for asylum:
At 36:21 into the video.
Which, for motobiling's benefit is 45 mins long, he'd do well to watch it all before being abusive about people's intelligence.
The video also deals with the decades long attempt to prevent Asylum Seekers leaving France for UK.
As Lucy Morton explains (38 mins into the video) each time a fence, a wall, a preventitive measure is created to stop the asylum seekers, it merely serves to push the departure point further away and increase the risks to the asylum seekers.
As Lucy explains, eventually if you have a fence around the coast of France, Belgium, Holland, etc, you will simply force the asylum seekers to depart from Spain, etc.
Trying to stop the asyum seekers crossing the channel on small boats is a futile approach. It simply creates another problem.
