A gang of French fishermen have been jailed for five years for smuggling 130 Albanians into the UK via beaches near Plymouth.
A trial in Rennes, in Brittany, heard how the fishermen from Paimpol, preyed on 'human misery' and 'desperation'.
French prosecutor Anne Fourmel said Britain was seen as the 'Eldorado' for hundreds of desperate illegal immigrants and these fishermen were attracted by 'easy missions and easy money'.
Mrs Fournel said: "This was the trial of the exploitation of human misery as desperate people are prepared to pay colossal sums of money to leave their country to find their Eldorado in Great Britain."
The procureure de la République (French procurator) asked that all fishermen involved in the clandestine human smuggling operations each pay a £360 fine per illegal immigrant ferried across the Channel.
Mrs Fournel asked that Albanian national Edmond Rapi, the mastermind behind the human trafficking ring, serve seven years in prison and pay a £110,000 fine.
However as Mr Rapi was judged in absentia, an international warrant has now been issued for his arrest. Each of the five ringleaders, including a businessman from Brittany were all sentenced to five years in prison.
Between January 2002 and January 2003 the fishermen carried out 16 trips in sail boats and motor boats between ports in Brittany and Normandy and dropped off their passengers in coves and on beaches along the coastline between Weymouth, Plymouth and South East Cornwall.
Most of the defendants are from the Breton port of Paimpol and skippered their own boats, the prosecutor said.
She told the court that the fishermen, mainly in their 20s, all knew each other, and had been 'attracted by easy missions and easy money'.
The sailors were paid £700 for each passenger but gangsters charged the illegal immigrants up to £7,000 each.
The fishermen were arrested in June last year after months of surveillance carried out by undercover French detectives.
Martin Menear, a former Border Force union representative and current secretary for the Labour party in South East Cornwall, said: "It's incredibly easy to get into the UK.
"Cornwall has 300 miles of coastline but no UK border staff. None. Smuggling has been going on in Cornwall and Devon for centuries but now it's cocaine or illegal immigrants."
Mr Menear said the UK Border Force is now tasked with focusing on scanning passports quickly at British airports to reduce queues but is not preventing illegal immigration and human trafficking.
He added: "While anyone can land into Falmouth with a yacht full of any number of people who can then disappear into we have a border force who has to keep airport queues to a minimum.
"It seems that no-one is looking at the problem so they can't see it."
Mr Menear said the UK Border Force has been slashed by the Conservative and Coalition government since 2010 which is why Britain's borders have become so porous.
Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, said it was ironic that while the UK Border Force has all this high tech equipment, smuggling into Britain continues.
He said: "Our borders are far too porous for my liking and the liking of most people in this country. We have to invest more in our border force so it becomes a more coordinated border force with a land, sea and air element.
"It would be expensive but we face unprecedented time with hundreds of thousands of people being displaced and looking for a better life.
"We don't have enough room to accommodate them all. If we don't want them here we need a border force which can patrol our borders better."
The call for a better border force comes as a gang of 13 French fishermen who ferried more than 130 Albanians to the Westcountry, landing them on remote beaches along the coast over three years, have been sentenced to up to five years in jail.
Unlike the main ferry links at Calais, Dunkirk and Cherbourg, where strict controls are constantly in force, the small Breton fishing ports were easy prey for people smugglers.
Lucy Moreton, general secretary of the Immigration Services Union, which represents UK Border Force staff said Britain's entire coastline was patrol by only two cutters with two others being deployed in the Mediterranean to help with the refugees crisis.
She said: "It's not so much a question of overwhelming our defences, more that we don't have any in the first place.
"We only have two cutters patrolling the Channel and that's a lot of sea."
The people-trafficking trial is just one of several opening at the court in Rennes this month.
Another two French skippers who were stopped while heading to the UK in a luxury yacht with 15 Albanians on board also appeared to face human trafficking charges.
French border police have together been cracking down on the illicit cross-Channel trade which has boomed as a result of tougher security measures around the Calais ferry terminal and Eurostar train tunnel.
The numbers of immigrants living in squalid camps in and around Calais has risen to almost 7,000 in recent months.
French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve recently revealed that police had broken nearly 200 people smuggling networks around the country, arresting up to 3,000 individuals along the way.
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