Migrant transfers from Paris anger mayors

PARIS: Mayors in rural and small-town France are increasingly angry over the transfer of migrants from the capital to their communities, which they believe is linked to clean-up efforts ahead of the Paris Olympics.

Serge Grouard, the right-wing mayor of Orleans in central France, went public on Monday with his complaints over the arrival of up to 500 homeless migrants in his town of 100,000 people without his prior knowledge.

“It has been proved that every three weeks, a coach arrives in Orleans from Paris, with between 35-50 people on board,” he told reporters, adding that it was to “clean the deck” in the capital ahead of the Olympics in July and August.

Each new arrival is offered three weeks in a hotel at the state’s expense, but is thereater let to fend for themselves, Grouard explained.

Paris has long been a magnet for asylum seekers and migrants, mostly from Africa, South Asia or the Middle East, with demand for short-term emergency accommodation far exceeding supply.

As a result, informal camps under bridges or on unoccupied land spring up regularly around the capital, which are periodically torn down by police.

Occupants are offered the chance to apply for asylum and the government’s policy is to move many of them out of Paris and into facilities elsewhere in the country.

“We haven’t been consulted, either about the creation or about the people who will go there,” the deputy mayor of Strasbourg, Floriane Varieras, said when asked about a new facility near her city in eastern France.

“That’s where I agree with the mayor of Orleans, the rather opaque side of what is happening,” she added.

In January, the major of Lavaur, a small town near Toulouse in southwest France, issued a public leter in which he denounced the policy of transferring migrants around the country as “irresponsible” and “dangerous.”

“To make Paris in all likelihood more ‘presentable’ and more controllable, six months before the Olympic Games,” wrote Bernard Carayon.