Britain and France to Begin Work on Wall Near Calais to Keep Migrants From Channel Tunnel

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/world/europe/calais-jungle-refugees.html

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PARIS — Construction of a wall to keep migrants from reaching a road that leads to the French port of Calais will begin this month, officials said this week. The wall, a joint project by Britain and France, is the latest attempt to address security concerns and local displeasure with a ramshackle camp for migrants at the English Channel port.

“We are going to start building this big new wall very soon,” Robert Goodwill, the British immigration minister, told Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee in London on Tuesday. “We’ve done the fence, now we are doing the wall.”

The proposed wall will be four meters high, or about 13 feet, and will run for one kilometer, or about 0.6 miles, along both sides of the road that approaches the port of Calais, as an extension of the existing fence and barbed-wire barrier, according to the committee’s press office.

For years, migrants trying to reach Britain have gathered in a sprawling and overcrowded camp known as the “Jungle” on the outskirts of Calais, which is less than 30 miles across the channel from the British port city of Dover.

Increased security around the port and the entrance to the Channel Tunnel has made it more difficult for migrants, most of them from the Middle East and Africa, to get directly onto trains or ferries.

But it has also made those who cannot afford a smuggler more desperate in their attempts to hide on trucks and other vehicles by using makeshift barriers to block traffic and climb aboard. At least eight migrants have died on the road since the beginning of the year.

François Guennoc, an activist with L’Auberge des Migrants, an organization that helps migrants in Calais, said he did not expect the wall to make the road any safer than the miles of fences, barbed wire and surveillance cameras that are already in place.

“It’s a bad way of wasting British money,” Mr. Guennoc said in a telephone interview, adding that the wall would only move the problem further inland along the road. “Walls don’t work.”

The idea of building physical barriers to keep migrants away has been raised in the American presidential race as well, with the Republican presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, promising to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Unlike that wall, however, the one in France has money behind it: Britain has pledged 17 million pounds, or nearly $23 million, to help France deal with the Jungle.

The French authorities dismantled the southern half of the camp in February and March, but the number of migrants there has risen to between 7,000 to 9,000 people, straining relations between communities of migrants and between the migrants and local residents.

On Monday, French truck drivers and other protesters blocked traffic on the road leading to the port, and asked that the camp be razed. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who visited Calais last week, said the authorities would completely dismantle the camp, but did not say when.

The influx of migrants fleeing war, persecution or poverty has also affected Paris, where the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, detailed on Tuesday plans for this fall to open centers that would temporarily shelter and help migrants arriving in the French capital.

A center for single men, in northern Paris, will have room for up to 600 people; another in a southern suburb, for families, women and children, will have room for 350.

The city’s authorities have taken more than 15,000 migrants off the streets of Paris since June of last year, Ms. Hidalgo said, noting that there was a “link with what is going on in Calais” because some migrants were on their way there.

But Ms. Hidalgo has stressed that the centers in Paris would be temporary — they are being built on city land scheduled to be used for other projects in the coming years — and that the migrants were expected to spend only five to 10 days there for medical and administrative help.

“The first goal of this refugee camp is to shelter people until they are oriented toward state-run housing,” she said, referring to France’s dedicated housing for asylum seekers.

“If other temporary shelter centers have to be created,” they will be, she added.