Migrants from Calais, France | When the sea becomes safer than the land

The dismantling of the Calais “jungle”, which then hosted nearly 10,000 migrants, began on October 24, 2016. Five years later, the shantytown that had so marked people’s minds is gone. The migrants are still there, despite the multiplication of police interventions in the last year, supposed to prevent them from taking to sea.

(Calais) It is Sunday, 8 a.m. The sun has just risen over Calais and, for once, it is not raining despite the middle of October.

The people of Calais are still in bed, but there are already around twenty police officers, grouped together in four vans, as well as two cleaning trucks plying the streets. Although almost nothing is open today, interventions towards migrants continue on a daily basis.

If the route of the police is not known, the six or seven places where the migrants are in the city, they are. And for those waiting to cross to Britain, moving their tents has actually become a morning ritual to avoid checks and seizures.

At the first stop, on private land near the Memorial Stadium, there is no one left. The migrants “self-evicted” on the public highway, just at the edge of the field. The police therefore cannot intervene.

But a little further, in another “place of life”, dozens of migrants were not so quick.

“Every day, they come very early in the morning to take the tents. With the cold, it’s a bit difficult anyway, ”says Cherrif, a Beninese migrant.

An hour later, it is the turn of the Tigrayans gathered near the Calais hospital to have the visit of the police.

As with every intervention, a huge security perimeter keeps journalists and associations at bay. The operation, lasting at most 30 minutes with around 40 migrants, left two families with children homeless.

“In our country, our parents go to church early on Sunday morning, but here, in the camps in France, we are the police who come,” says one of the migrants.

No more “fixing points”

This morning cat-and-mouse game is a direct legacy of the dismantling of the “jungle” of 2016.

In addition to international political pressure, the United Kingdom and France releasing the ball on this migration issue, the slogan of the authorities is to avoid “points of fixation”, that is to say the return. of any type of sustainable camp in Calais.

But the increase in police presence goes well beyond touring the camps. On the beaches, at sea and even in the air, patrols have added to the kilometers of walls and barbed wire that are now part of the Calais landscape.

Several associations also complain about this “harassment” and this “inhuman demonstration of force” by the authorities against migrants. In the hope of a winter truce in actions against migrants, three activists, including the 72-year-old priest Philippe Demeestère, began a hunger strike on October 11.

“More and more, there is this rejection by the municipality which is decidedly very hostile to the presence of exiles,” explains Mr. Demeestère. There is a stubbornness which leaves one speechless because we do not understand why people, who are deemed intelligent, persist in applying a policy on the ground which turns out to be completely powerless. ”

Pushed to the Sea

All this police presence did not, in fact, reduce the number of passages to Great Britain, on the contrary.

In its “Plan for Immigration” published in March 2021, the British government estimated that the number of irregular entries, all categories combined, rose from around 14,000 entries detected in 2018 to more than 16,000 in 2020.

The difference is the increase in passages by small boats.

According to Home Office data published in the British press at the end of September, more than 17,000 migrants have reached British shores since the start of the year. This is more than double than in 2020.

“You have to understand that you only embark your children in a boat if the water is safer than dry land”, wrote in 2010 the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, who herself fled the civil war.

Words from Africa, which seem to have been perfectly written to explain the situation in Calais. It pushes more than one to try his luck at sea, rather than wait for the next French police intervention.