The French government recently flew Khalil Mahmoud more than 500 miles to France’s sunny south as part of a plan to disperse refugees bottled up at the English Channel, reports The Wall Street Journal.
A few days later, though, the 28-year-old Syrian had already gone back north to the Jungle, a migrant camp that sprawls across windswept dunes on the channel’s French coast.
A recent government campaign to dismantle the camp - relocating more than 2,000 refugees and migrants, including Mr. Mahmoud, to other parts of France and Europe - is running up against a defiant migrant population.
Migrants say leaving the Jungle, as its inhabitants and Calais locals have dubbed it, would mean abandoning their goal of living and working in the UK.
That resistance has helped transform the Jungle from a makeshift camp into a tent city replete with schools, grocery stores, restaurants and houses of worship. In October, a record 6,000 migrants were living in the camp, double the number living there in August, according to French authorities. “The only thing that is missing now is stoplights,” said Didier Degrémont, vice president for Secours Catholique, a Catholic charity helping migrants in the area.
The Jungle’s expansion is fueling momentum for France’s far-right National Front, which preliminary results showed had taken the largest share of support in a first round of regional elections on Sunday. French President François Hollande is under pressure to show his government’s decision to welcome thousands of Syrian refugees won’t expose the country to new terrorist threats. Two of the suicide bombers involved in the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris reached France after blending in with waves of Syrian migrants entering Greece.
Marine Le Pen, the National Front’s party leader, has pointed to the camp as a symbol of the government’s failure to manage the refugee crisis and as a gaping hole in the country’s security apparatus.
Ms. Le Pen herself is standing in elections that will decide the Calais region’s next president. In that region, where Ms. Le Pen is heading the National Front ticket, the far-right party took an enormous lead with 40.64% of the vote, according to preliminary results. If Ms. Le Pen wins a second-round vote next Sunday, the victory would mark the highest office ever attained by the party, which is positioning her to challenge Mr. Hollande for the presidency in 2017.
The Jungle also illustrates the challenges the European Union faces with its own plan to redistribute migrants - many of them refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq - across the bloc. The resettlement plan was designed to ease the pressure on Germany, the UK and other strong EU economies that have become magnets for migrants.
Those living in Calais, however, have their own plans for laying down roots in Europe. Several hundred migrants every night attempt to sneak into trucks that drive through the tunnel to reach the UK, hoping to reach economic opportunity and family members.
For years, France’s border with the UK remained porous, allowing scores of migrants to reach the UK As recently as October 9th, a group of 180 migrants managed to sneak into the UK from Calais overnight, said a French official.
A UK Home Office spokeswoman declined to comment on whether there were any arrests that night. The government said migrants have been stopped 40,981 times after crossing into the UK from France in the year ended April 2015.
Since then, France has reinforced security at the port of Calais and the entrance of the tunnel that crosses the English Channel, erecting high razor-wire fences and deploying 1,200 police in the area.
“Now, barely anyone makes it across,” the French official said.
The camp’s growth is stoking tensions with local residents. In November, Doctors of the World closed a clinic in the migrant camp after it was ransacked at night. A few days later, a camper that Doctors of the World used to provide showers was set on fire outside the group’s office in central Calais.
Jean-François Corty, who heads the group’s French operations, says the fire “wasn’t an accident,” adding that Doctors of the World has filed a complaint with police. “Many people here don’t like what we do,” Dr. Corty said. A spokesman for French police declined to comment.
Riots also routinely erupt inside the Jungle, and migrants often clash with police around the port and the tunnel. “We had never seen such violence,” a police officer said.
Read more of this report from The Wall Street Journal.
See also:The controversial new strategy to draw migrants out of Calais 'jungle'