Paris mayor warns of migrant woes as Calais camp closed

Calais / AFP

French authorities were on Monday clearing the last shacks in the Calais “Jungle”, signalling the end of the notorious camp, as attention turned to the thousands of migrants sleeping rough in Paris.
The authorities have said that nothing will be left of the notorious Jungle, home to around 6,000 migrants until a week ago, by Monday evening.
But Europe’s refugee crisis continues to spill over onto the streets of France, with the focus shifting to the plight of hundreds of migrants living in a ballooning makeshift camp in the northeast of Paris. On Monday, workers in white overalls backed by a digger began clearing tents and mattresses from a street in the northeastern Stalingrad district, where around 2,000 migrants have been living under an overhead metro line.
Riot police with shields sealed off the area during the operation—a prelude to a bigger effort in the coming days to clear the area, which is a long-standing magnet for the homeless in the capital. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has urged the government to intervene to give asylum-seekers a roof over their heads.
In a letter to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve that was made public on Monday the Socialist mayor sounded the alarm over the “dramatic humanitarian and sanitary situation” in the city’s northeast.

‘Unbecoming of France’
Six months before France’s presidential election the Socialist government is on a drive to take migrants off the streets and transfer them to shelters around the country where they can seek asylum.
The City of Paris is to open a migrant reception centre with capacity for 400 single men in the coming days—a fraction of those seeking shelter.
On Saturday, President Francois Hollande declared that the existence of squalid settlements was “unbecoming of what a French welcome should be”.
“We will no longer tolerate them,” he said, hailing the evacuation of around 5,000 people from the Jungle last week.