Migrant crisis: Paris mayor unveils refugee camp plan

Indigent migrants have become a common sight in Paris.   In the shabby northeast of the city, but also in more fashionable neighbourhoods, rows of eyes look up from mattresses or sheets of cardboard spread on the pavement. They wash in city fountains, brush their teeth over the gutter, comb hair in rear-view mirrors.

The socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to stop the cycle of makeshift encampments being demolished by police, sometimes with violence. More than 20 Paris camps have been destroyed in the past year.

“In 10 or 15 years, I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and not feel guilty for failing to help people in danger,” Hidalgo said on May 31st, when she promised to establish the city’s first official refugee camp.

"The Paris refugee camp will be the first built in a dense urban zone in Europe, " Hidalgo said on presenting the plan in the incongruously splendid Hôtel de Ville yesterday. "This centre corresponds to our values. We act without naivety, but with humanity."

A 1,000sq m inflatable bubble at 70, blvd Ney in the 18th district will house the central welcome centre for newly arrived migrants in Paris.

‘Place to rest’

The project will be managed by the Emmaus Solidarité association. One hundred salaried employees and hundreds of volunteers will work on the sites.

“It will be much easier to care for them as they arrive than weeks or months after they’ve settled in encampments,” Hidalgo said. “We’ll give them a place to rest, receive medical and psychological care and legal advice.”

A disused warehouse belonging to the city and the SNCF railway company, adjacent to the bubble, is being converted to house 400 male migrants.

The camp will be organised in eight brightly coloured “neighbourhoods”. There will be six showers and latrines for every 50 men.

The centre will provide one meal daily, wifi connections and “convival spaces”.

Coaches will transport women and children from the bubble centre to a former water purification plant with a capacity of 350 in the suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, south east of Paris.

Valid claim

Refugees will be allowed to stay only five to 10 days in the Paris camps, after which they are supposed to be taken to “welcome and orientation centres” (CAOs) for asylum seekers elsewhere in

France

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The city of Paris does not distinguish between economic migrants and refugees, but the government does. Only those deemed to have a valid claim to asylum will be taken to the CAOs.

Others are expected to “evaporate” after their short stay in the refugee camp.

Up to 80 new migrants arrive in Paris daily. Hidalgo’s goal of receiving them all in transit camps can only be achieved if the state fulfils its promise to create thousands more places in CAOs, and if there is a constant flow from the CAOs to the longer term “welcome centres for asylum seekers” known as CADAs.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve hopes the numbers will diminish as the EU imposes more strict border controls. He also hopes that the Paris camps will prevent shanty towns springing up in the capital when the Calais "Jungle" is eventually dismantled.

The all-male centre is to be completed by the end of this month and opened by mid-October. The women and children’s centre is scheduled to open by the end of the year.

Moral victory

The opening of the camps will constitute a moral victory for Hidalgo, who is more welcoming to migrants than the central government. She sent aides to study the camp at Grande-Synthe, on the English Channel, where the green mayor built the country’s first refugee camp that meets international standards. The government opposed it, but eventually assumed responsibility for the camp.

The right has opposed the creation of the Paris camps out of fear that they will act as magnets for more migrants. Inhabitants of the wealthy, conservative 16th district are suing in the hope of reversing Hidalgo’s plan to house 200 homeless people in the adjacent Bois de Boulogne.

The roof of a new centre for asylum seekers at Forges-les-Bains, 45km southwest of Paris, burned overnight from Monday, hours after a demonstration against the centre. If, as suspected, it was an arson attack, the interior minister promised the perpetrators will be punished.