By: V4 Agency
The migrant situation in Paris is becoming increasingly worrying. The capital’s Socialist mayor is expecting the government to come up with a solution, even though a few years ago she was the one who proposed a bill on the reception and integration of migrants, taking the issue into her own hands.
Paris, also known as the City of Light, is becoming less and less bright, with parts of it looking more like a dilapidated refugee camp. Some districts of the French capital are overrun by migrants, who are demanding more and more.
As V4NA reported earlier, in early December, hundreds of migrants claiming to be minors camped for days in front of the Council of State building, next to the Louvre in the heart of Paris, demanding that the French state provide free accommodation for them.
The migrants’ demands were finally met by the authorities, and they were all taken to a gymnasium where they were given food and accommodation.
However, the move did little to resolve the issue of all migrants in Paris. Many remained on the streets, dozens of them with banners, completely paralysing traffic near the 18th district’s Porte de la Chapelle station, in the north of the capital.
Even Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo acknowledged that the situation in the 18th district, known as a no-go zone, is now truly untenable. When she paid a visit to the area, Ms Hidalgo said that the French state should provide housing for migrants who now live in tents, as immigration is a government competence. She will return to the La Chapelle district as many times as necessary, the leftist mayor stressed in a recent tweet.
The mayor, however, was in for an embarrassing surprise during her visit, as a heckler disturbed her speech by shouting that Ms Hidalgo was the shame of France and Paris. “It took two centuries to make Paris the most beautiful city in the world, but in two terms you’ve turned it into its garbage bin,” the man shouted.
The 18th and 19th districts in the north of Paris have indeed seen better days. The situation has deteriorated to the point that children have to go to school with police escort because of the numerous drug addicts and dealers on the streets.
The sporadic drug dens in these areas, known as the capital’s notorious no-go zones, do house many illegal drug-addict migrants, so the issue of migrants and drug addiction is closely intertwined.
Although Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to deflect all the responsibility to the government now, a few years ago she was posing as the most enthusiastic saviour of the immigrants. In 2017, she made a proposal about the reception of migrants and the integration of refugees, and sent the related document to MPs and the government with a view to drafting a humanitarian bill on the reception of migrants under France’s national integration policy.
Ms Hidalgo, however, did not stop there. In October 2018, she called for the establishment of a camp for the migrants in Paris, saying that winter and cold weather were coming, yet immigrants were living on the streets or in occupied vacant buildings in the north of Paris, as can be seen in the video below.
In 2018, Ms Hidalgo still said that as the government did not respond in merit to her proposal about providing suitable accommodation for migrants, the French capital will take the matter into its own hand. The mayor asked her team to take an inventory of the buildings suitable for housing the migrants, and said that they found several buildings belonging to the municipality in which immigrants living on the street can be humanely quartered.
However, four years after the above video, the mayor is now saying something different, deflecting all the responsibility of housing and feeding the migrants to the government.