Home for the past year has been a blue Tarpaulin in a makeshift camp on wasteland known as the Jungle. Every lunchtime Ehsan eats a sandwich distributed by a local charity and every evening he tries to cling on to a lorry heading for Britain. He has never made it past the port.

“My luck is out,” said the 18-year-old Afghan from Kunduz, who fled his homeland after joining — and then leaving — the Taleban.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees wants to offer Ehsan and others like him an escape route. It is trying to encourage them to seek asylum in France and has opened an office in Calais, the only one of its kind in Europe outside the Italian island of Lampedusa. It distributes information sheets to the Afghans, Eritreans, Sudanese and Iraqi Kurds waiting to get into Britain, explaining the benefits of taking refugee status on French soil.

It is not easy, however, to free migrants such as these from the hands of the people-smuggling gangs. Their fees range from £3,000 to £12,000 a time.

In the month since the refugee body started its operation, only 120 asylum claims have been lodged — from about 1,000 people sleeping rough or squatting in the area. Yesterday Marie-Ange Lescure, a UNHCR consultant, was present at the bleak quay where the sandwiches are given out, along with an interpreter and Radoslaw Ficek, of France Tere D’Asile, the French refugee group.

“If you have been in danger in your countries of origin then you can seek protection here,” said Mr Ficek as several dozen Afghans gathered around him. When he asked who might be interested in a life in France, no one stepped forward. One of the men carefully tore a UNHCR information sheet into small pieces and threw it into a bin.

“The smugglers have been telling these people throughout their journeys that England is a paradise,” said Ms Lescure. “They say that as soon as you arrive in Dover there will be many people offering you a job; that you will be able to study during the day, work at night and send money back home. And they say there is no point in staying in France.”

The propaganda is unfounded, according to Mr Ficek, who says that France approves 10 per cent more asylum demands than the UK. But facts count for little amid what he describes as the fairytale of the British Eldorado.

“France won’t offer me a visa,” said Ehsan. “It won’t offer me a job. It doesn’t want to help me. Why would I stay here?”

There is another, more practical reason for his refusal to apply for refugee status in France — which emerges during the tale of his flight from Afghanistan. Ehsan’s father paid a gang to transport him through Turkey, Greece, Italy and France to Britain. But in Greece he was stopped by police and had his fingerprints taken.

They were entered into a European database that can be consulted by the French authorities. This means that, under an EU rule whereby an asylum claim has to be made in the first safe port of call, he would be sent back to Greece if he sought refugee status in France.

The same was true of most of the other Afghans on the quayside and many of the Eritreans, such as Yussef, 22, whose father sold 50 cows to pay for his journey. “I went through Italy but Italy is no good. Italy doesn’t like black men,” he said. “France is better but I do not speak French. I must reach England — England is good. In England I will complete my education and I will work.”

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