This is compared to the 180,779 in the Army, Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Royal Air Force.

Migration Watch confirmed their data only included arrivals up to September 7. Since then, another 674 migrants arrived on nine boats on September 9, increasing the gap further.

Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch, said: “Military age men are pouring into Britain across the Channel. Enforcing a border is the most basic responsibility of a government, but Keir Starmer has failed to do even that.

“Illegal Channel crossing are now a major political crisis, and pose a real and present threat to our national security.”

Shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam told the Daily Express: “The fact that more people have illegally crossed the Channel in small boats since 2018 than we have serving in the British Armed Forces is a staggering indictment of Britain’s broken borders. But Labour have no credible plan to stop the crisis.

“The truth is the only policy that will deliver a credible deterrent is detain and deport. Until we detain every illegal migrant and quickly deport them to either their home country or safe third country the crossings will continue to rise and criminal gangs will continue to grow richer. Enforcing our borders is the most basic duty of government but Labour is failing.”

Analysis of Ministry of Defence figures shows the number of Channel migrant arrivals in 2024 exceeded the number of people in the Royal Air Force. Some 36,816 asylum seekers were detected last year, compared to 34,765 in the RAF. Almost 31,000 migrants have crossed the Channel so far this year, up around 38% on last year.

Labour’s new migration minister sensationally claimed Sir Keir Starmer’s “one-in, one-out” deal with Emmanuel Macron is “starting to act as a deterrent”.

Mike Tapp insisted migrants are considering whether they want to give smugglers up to £10,000 to cross the Channel. This is despite almost 2,000 people crossing in the last five days alone. And a record number of migrants were detected in the Channel in July – the month when the agreement with Paris was struck.

Mr Tapp told BBC Breakfast: “This is a pilot scheme which took some really hard negotiation from Yvette Cooper and her team. We would like to see it grow. At the moment, it’s starting to act as a deterrent, because, if for example, you run a car business and one in 15 of your cars that you are selling is dodgy, your business model starts to fall down.

“But this is only a part of what we’re doing. We’re also striking more returns agreements with other nations, there are hard negotiations going on there. Importantly, for the public, we’re moving people out of hotels.

“We are exploring MoD sites so that we can close those hotels faster. Unfortunately we inherited a system from the Conservatives of open borders. We had 400 crossings in 2018. Over 150,000 since.”