France has possibly the harshest policy in Europe towards Roma immigrants. Most live in camps that are regularly demolished by police - and then rebuilt. Every year thousands are deported, but the overall number in the country remains the same, reports BBC News.
Before dawn on a winter's morning police came to destroy Alex's home.
"They said: 'Everybody out; we're going to smash this camp.' They gave us half an hour to collect our things," the 18-year-old recalls.
The 15 Roma families living in a wood outside Paris were no match for the 100-odd riot police deployed to evict them.
Diggers swung into action. Within an hour nothing remained of the encampment. Large holes had been dug across the site to stop anyone settling there again.
Asked how it feels to see the hut he had built razed to the ground, Alex shrugs: "Nothing. I've been through this many times."
Like most of the estimated 20,000 ethnic Roma living in France, Alex comes from Romania. And like most, he has been expelled from one squalid camp to the next for years.
Hundreds of thousands of Roma - mostly from Romania and Bulgaria - have moved to Western Europe since the 1990s. Widely perceived as scroungers and thieves, they are rarely made welcome.
But they come under a particular kind of pressure in France. Their illegal camps - such as the one Alex occupied in Champs-sur-Marne, east of Paris - are systematically destroyed by authorities.
According to the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), 19,300 Roma people were evicted across France last year - more than double the 2012 figure.
"They don't know from one minute to the next if they're going to get evicted," says Gabriela Hrabanova, of the European Roma Grassroots Organisations Network.
In their countries of origin, Roma people face widespread discrimination but are at least allowed to settle in one place. "Evictions are very rare in Eastern Europe," Hrabanova notes.
Many of the evicted Roma end up being deported - almost 11,000 Romanian nationals were deported from France last year, more than any other immigrant group. Being a citizen of a European Union country offers little protection as EU law allows a member country to expel people who are deemed a burden on its social system.
In September Interior Minister Manuel Valls said that Roma people have "lifestyles that are very different from ours" and that "their destiny is to return to Romania or Bulgaria".
Philippe Goosens of the European Association for the Defence of Human Rights points out that France is the only EU country that has such a "policy of rejection".
Officials deny targeting an ethnic group, however. The government insists it is only enforcing the law, destroying illegal settlements on orders from judges.
Champs-sur-Marne alone has seen more than 20 camp demolitions in the past 18 months, says local activist François Loret.
One aim of such operations is to remove unsightly, unsafe, and unsanitary sites that have no water or electricity. However, Loret and others point out that the exercise is self-defeating. As soon as police tear down one camp, another is built nearby. Alex and his neighbours are now busy building another hut a few hundred metres from the last.
"They live in increasingly precarious living conditions that prevent them for integrating locally," says ethnologist Martin Olivera. "They are being maintained in a nomadic way of life they have not chosen."
Alex says he would love to have a permanent home, but for that he would need a proper job.
Read more of this report from BBC News.
See also:
Right-wing mayor slammed after suggesting Roma people should be left to burn
French government launches new wave of crackdowns on Roma camps
Roma evictions: more than 2,000 removed from camps this summer
'It's all for show': French police officers speak out on Roma evictions