400,000 illegal immigrants turn Paris into ‘new Calais’

ILLEGAL immigrants, now estimated to make up a fifth of the population of SeineSaint-Denis, north-east of Paris, are severely straining public services and creating social tensions, according to a parliamentary report.

Seine-Saint-Denis has long been the French area with the highest proportion of immigrants, but the report warns that the number of illegal migrants may have risen as high as 400,000.

The report catalogues what the conservative newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ describes as “the incredible deterioration of social, economic and security conditions” in the area, where 28pc of the population lives below the poverty line.

Police, schools, courts and other public services are struggling to cope, while the presence of undocumented foreign nationals is blocking the implementation of effective policies by the authorities, argue the two MPs who wrote the report – Rodrigue Koukouendo, from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party, and François Cornut-Gentille, from the centre-right Republicans.

Parisians demanding tougher policies and more deportations complain that the capital has become “the new Calais”.