It's easy to see how someone might fall into an anti-immigrant pipeline with news like this.
- Thousands of immigrants are willing to risk death to reach the UK which they see as a promised land
- I live in the UK and see nothing of this promised land, on the contrary my life is quite shitty, I'm barely making the ends meet
- Therefore the good life opportunities are taken by the immigrants
Of course what's missing is the first-hand insight in the immigrant life, which is far from comfortable.
Which makes me think what is driving those people to see specifically the UK as a promised land. Rather than any other country. Mass hysteria/cultural phenomenon? An extreme case of FOMO?
At some point airlines stopped doing the hub-and-spoke model where all flight come into one big airport and then passengers change flights onward to their destination. Now they favor the point-to-point model, which as the name suggests means every destination pair is served by an individual flight.
As to why. It's probably financial but it don't know for sure really.