(Vitry-sur-Seine) “You know, in France, there is not just Paris. Bordeaux is good, it’s warmer than here! »: an employee of the Immigration Office tries to convince a migrant evacuated from the largest squat in France, near Paris, to leave for the southwest of the country. Without much success.
In this squat in Vitry-sur-Seine (south of the capital), an abandoned company occupied for almost three years, several hundred migrants – up to 450 – lived until recently. Prepared for several days by the associations for an imminent evacuation, the 300 people still present witnessed the arrival of the police on Wednesday, in calm.
The majority of single men, women and a few young children, many legally in France, left this former transport company. By carrying bags and suitcases which contain all their belongings from a life of wandering.
In the cold, their faces closed and worried, they are grouped together in the courtyard. Behind tables, staff from the prefectures and the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii) guide them and offer temporary rehousing.
Clutching their administrative documents carefully placed in plastic bags, the migrants have barely a few minutes to explain their situation, in sometimes broken French or stammering English.
Under the surveillance of the police, the queues stretch in front of these open-air offices. With the exception of the one dedicated to departures to the provinces.
Most of them, asylum seekers, are strongly encouraged to join “sas” – temporary reception structures – in Bordeaux (southwest) and the Loire Valley (center). Buses leaving for these destinations wait in front of the gates, but struggle to fill.
” I want to stay here ”
“You want to go to the region? There’s more room there, it’s dynamic! », Explains an Ofii employee to a doubtful-looking young migrant who has difficulty understanding the proposal.
“There is not only Paris as a city in France,” she insists. Wasted effort, his interlocutor explains that he is taking training in Île-de-France. He is directed towards the neighboring table to find a place in an “airlock” closer to Paris.
Abakar, also a Sudanese refugee, 29 years old, was in Nantes (west). He moved to the Paris region to follow training in logistics. The young man says he got a job offer in a supermarket: “I want to stay here, I can’t always go elsewhere.”
For several months, associations have denounced the evacuation of squats in the Paris region and street camps at a more sustained pace, according to them, to clear the way before the Olympic Games and its thousands of tourists.
“There are places in reception structures near Paris, but, clearly, the desire is to move them away from the capital. Especially before the Olympics,” assures Paul Alauzy, representative of the NGO Médecins du monde.
Thank you Daniel, a Sudanese asylum seeker, entrusted her children to an association in Val-de-Marne, south-east of the capital. Inside the squat, she explains, “there was too much violence.” But she does not want to leave Île-de-France. “I’m afraid I won’t see them again.” She was finally sent to a hotel in Boissy-Saint-Léger, in the Paris region, for a few days.
Sitting on her suitcase, Ishia, five months pregnant, seems lost. Like her husband, Gamaral, whom she met a few years ago during a long journey of exile, she fled Sudan. They arrived in France three weeks ago.
Ishia is sent to a hospital. Gamaral does not “know what to hope for”.
reference: www.lapresse.ca