France-Italy border at heart of struggle

The MENTON, FRANCE — trains coming from Italy arrive at a countryside station one mile past the French border, and that is where the journey for migrants tends to stop. French police board the trains, walk past beachgoers, look under seats and force their way into bathrooms. They take undocumented migrants off the trains, drive them up a hilly road and deposit them back at the Italian border.

Those denied entry typically walk the five miles back to the Italian town they started from, where they can catch another train to France and try again.

“I’m already thinking about the next place I’ll hide,” said Mohammed Yaugoub Ali, 19, from Sudan.

The ritual, playing out day after day in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean, illustrates the central tension in Europe’s debate over its responsibilities toward migrants - a debate that has risen to the level of political crisis even as the flow of new migrants has slowed significantly since 2015.

On the French side of the border, President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly emphasized the importance of welcoming people fleeing oppression, in accordance, he notes, with European principles and values. But while he is willing to make allowances for some of the neediest refugees seeking asylum in France, Macron has taken a severe stance on migrants seeking economic opportunities, and he has resisted resettling those who have already applied for asylum elsewhere in Europe. France hasn’t yet taken in all the refugees it promised to accept from the front-line countries of Italy and Greece in 2015.

Italians, meanwhile, object that migrants are being fenced out by foreign leaders — in France, Switzerland and Austria — looking out only for themselves. About 400,000 people have applied for asylum in Italy over the past four years.