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Marine Le Pen calls for end to all immigration to France

Head of far-right Front National said legal immigration should end and migrants without right documents should not get state health care.

La rédaction de Mediapart

This article is freely available.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has called for an end to all immigration to France, legal and illegal. In a speech aimed at rallying her Front National (FN) ahead of regional elections, she failed to mention her father's explusion from the party but did lay into immigrants, Islamists and President François Hollande, reports RFI.

"They don't tell you this but the immigration situation in France is totally out of control," Le Pen said at a meeting to mark the start of France's new political season. "My aim is clear: to stop immigration both legal and illegal."

The FN's programme officially calls for immigration to be limited to 10,000 people per year but Le Pen went further, declaring, "We need national borders for France."

Undocumented immigrants should not receive state-funded medical care and social security payments to asylum-seekers should end, she said.

Repeating a demand she made after the 21 August failed attack on a high-speed train from Belgium to France, she called for "all foreigners on file for links with radical Islamist movements to be deported", adding that "radical mosques" should be closed and their imams be thrown out of the country if they are foreigners.

Hollande was a "do-nothing president", she told her audience in the village of Brachay, where she won 72 per cent of the votes in the last presidential election.

Read more of this report from RFI.