The mayors of small towns in rural France are increasingly frustrated over the transfer of migrants from the French capital to their communities, stating they believe it is linked to the upcoming Paris Olympics.
The mayor of Orleans, Serge Grouard, said on Monday 500 homeless migrants arrived in his town of 100,000 without his prior knowledge.
“It has been proved that every three weeks, a coach arrives in Orleans from Paris with between 35-50 people on board,” he said, adding there were rumors it was to “clean the deck” before the Olympics in July and August.
Grouard said each new arrival is given three weeks in a hotel but is afterwards left to fend for themselves.
Informal camps under bridges or on unoccupied land have sprung up around the capital and are periodically dismantled by the police.
The French government’s policy is to move many asylum seekers into facilities elsewhere in the country outside of Paris.
The state’s regional security office said arrivals in Orleans were “not linked to the organization of the Paris Olympics” and stated Orleans was one of 10 “temporary regional reception centers.”
“We haven’t been consulted, either about the creation or about the people who will go there,” Floriane Varieras, the deputy mayor of Strasbourg told the AFP when asked about a regional facility near her city.
French President Emmanuel Macron supported the idea of dispersing asylum seekers and refugees around the country in a speech in 2022.
More than a million people filed requests for asylum in the European Union in 2023 and France received the second-highest number of requests at 167,000.
Revers de la medaille (the other side of the medal) spoke out against what it referred to as “social cleansing” ahead of the Olympics with efforts to remove migrants and the homeless from Paris.
