A recent history of camps in French migration policy, part 1: Making camps

On Monday 23 November 2020, around 7pm, several hundred exilés pitched 200 tents on place de la République, Paris. The exilés—a term used in French to avoid the problematic categories of ‘immigrant’ and ‘refugee’—had come from the camp at St-Denis, north of the city, and had not been able to benefit from the shelter campaign organised the previous week by the Paris prefecture. They were accompanied by support organisations, lawyers, elected officials and journalists. Despite the resistance of the exilés and their supporters, the square was emptied that same night. The police pursued men and women with nowhere to go late into the night, and beyond the city limits. The violence they deployed was captured in numerous images on social media. 

This operation was far from unusual, contrary to what you might think from the media coverage it attracted. That unprecedented attention is explained by a conjunction of factors: the place where it happened (the centre of Paris), the context (a rise in criticism of police violence, and the adoption of a law which forbids its filming), the people involved (journalists and elected officials were assaulted, no longer just exilés and their allies). But since 2 June 2015, when a camp under the overhead metro line at la Chapelle was emptied, there have been 66 operations of this type in the French capital and its surrounding areas: an average of one a month. In and around Calais, they have become routine. 

Camp expulsions have therefore become commonplace, relayed by a string of similar articles in the press, that often prefer, over analysis, a list of hard, immediate facts—not unlike police press releases. This umpteenth episode is the latest in a long line. What does it reveal? What phenomena take concrete form here? 

To understand all this, we revisit how camps are created and evictions staged, turning our gaze to what happens behind the scenes, in the shadows left by the media spotlight.

Making camps

At first glance, camps seem to be evidence of an ‘overflow’: proof that foreigners are too numerous, that we’ve reached the limits of our capacity to receive them, both economically and socially. In reality, camps are made by the state’s migration policy choices—not by uncontrollable numbers.

Those who survive in the camps of northern Paris are mostly seeking asylum: some are waiting for a response to their claim, others simply to be able to apply, while a minority have been rejected. They are mostly Afghans and Sudanese, but also Ethiopians, Eritreans, and to a lesser extent Guineans and Ivorians. There are no Chinese, Sri Lankans, or Malians: these are hosted, for better or worse, by their long-settled compatriots. Nor are there Syrians, few of whom have come to France. 

The camps are a result of public policies which have made life precarious for asylum seekers, instead of allowing them to quietly integrate themselves into the social and economic fabric of the country. For asylum seekers have no right to work in France, under a law adopted in 1991. By way of compensation, they are supposed to receive accommodation, an allowance, and access to health care. But by forbidding them access to the labour market, the state places those seeking asylum in a situation of dependency, for which they are then reproached. And this has transformed into extreme precarity – even street homelessness for some – as successive reforms have placed numerous conditions on accessing and remaining in the welfare system. What support is provided, moreover, in practice comes ever later and more incomplete, frequently suspended on various grounds, or simply by mistake.

Camps are also made by the political choice to provide an asylum accommodation system that is structurally under-sized. This choice—and it is indeed a choice, not a matter of fate—is uniquely French. In the streets of European countries comparable to France there are no camps. The only countries that face this phenomenon are those, like Greece, Bulgaria or Italy, situated at the gates of Europe, that combine arrivals en masse with a context of economic decline.

At the height of migratory movements into Europe in 2015, France counted only 79,000 asylum seekers (or 0.1% its population). Germany counted a million, but without a single camp on its streets. Germany chose to open accommodation centres, requisition hundreds of sports halls, even a disused airport, rather than leave displaced people out of doors. In France, it is the theory of pull factors—by which favourable conditions are seen to attract migrants, while unfavourable conditions deter them—that explains the choice to favour a policy based on structural insufficiency. 

Camps emerge from both spontaneous dynamics (people on the streets who gather together to spend the night) and organised ones (NGOs who bring food, tents and clothes, and demand that public authorities install water points and toilets). They appear and grow until the day when the authorities, judging them too big and/or too visible, decide to evict them. These evictions, however, always leave in their wake the seeds of the next camp. 

For if some people are indeed sheltered in hotels, to enter the national reception system, others are placed in sports halls before being put back on the street a week or two later. A final group is systematically left on the pavement with no solution at all, not even the option of returning to the camp, now destroyed for public health reasons.

A survey conducted by organisations in 2020 showed that on average camp evictions leave a quarter of those affected with nowhere to stay that night, and that nearly half of those who are offered shelter find themselves back on the street in the following month. Two-thirds of those evicted will already have experienced this several times.

Hardly surprising, then, that camps follow shelter operations, and vice versa. That does not stop the prefecture from announcing, at each eviction, that this time is the last. 

A question therefore arises. At the sixty-sixth eviction, when long experience could inform new practices, why does nothing change?

Is it due to helplessness? Unpreparedness? Or are camps and evictions part of a repertoire of political action, rather than manifestations of a phenomenon that overwhelms it? They would then serve to frame public debate by staging and projecting immigration as a problem: an overflow, justifying (according to the never-proven theory of ‘pull factors’) a policy of the firm hand.  

This is the first part of an article that originally appeared in French at AOC—we’ll publish the second part, on encampment and eviction, next week. The translation was done by Juliette Frontier and edited by Benjamin Thomas White.

The header image shows an encampment in the region of Calais—a small group of tents in a grassy area set against a security fence next to a railway line. It was kindly provided by Maria Hagan, whose research you can read about here.