CALAIS – Since the announcement of the UK’s “one-in, one-out” migration deal with France, hundreds of black, yellow and white posters have appeared on the streets of Calais and Gravelines on France’s northern coast, warning refugees of the risk of deportation.
“Attention!” read the posters, locked inside weather-proof casing, “if you arrive in the UK by small boat illegally, you now risk being deported and will not be eligible to re-enter the UK or remain in France without the legal right to.”
Yet French officials are sceptical about whether the deal will make a real difference to small boat arrivals on British shores from across the Channel, saying the arrangement is still mired in confusion.
Under the deal, the UK is able to return migrants arriving on small boats to France in exchange for accepting the same number of migrants from France through formal, legal pathways. Since mid-September, more than 150 people have been sent to France and 150 asylum seekers have had their claims processed in the UK.
Bertrand Ringot, the mayor of Gravelines, a town where there are regular small boat departures, told The i Paper he had not been given clear information on the agreement, and was not convinced it had been properly put in place.
“Is the accord actually being implemented?” he asked, adding that, “as mayors in the region we haven’t been told how it is going to work practically. Will they be sent back to Paris? To Calais? How is that going to work? We haven’t been given precise information.”
Ringot is not the only mayor in the region who feels kept in the dark. Throughout September and October, the collective of mayors in the Pas-de-Calais region requested several meetings with the French interior ministry, and say they have been ignored by the government
When those sent back to France from the UK arrive, they are held for three days in a centre in Paris before being dispersed to temporary accommodation throughout France.
But concerns have been raised about the efficacy of the deal after two people who were deported from the UK to France returned to the UK and had to be deported again.
Calais resident Katia Clement, 52, told The i Paper the arrangement appeared “very chaotic”.
“I’m not sure it’s working well,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to change anything, it’s been going on so long. When I first got here 30 years ago it was starting.”
Julien Morel, owner of a gallery in the port city, was similarly pessimistic that it will change anything. “Frontex [the European border and coast guard agency] and border control has become a real industry, no one has any interest in making the situation better because they make money in the current system,” he claimed. Frontex’s budget has ballooned in the last few years, going from just under €500m from the EU and Schengen Associated countries in 2020, to €1.12bn in 2025.
Max, 24, says the presence of refugees doesn’t faze him. “I live between Calais and Lille and I know the number of migrants has gone down [from the days when] they called it the jungle,” he said. “I don’t see them a lot.”
The “Migrant Jungle”, as the refugee camps in Calais were known in the 2010s, was cleared in 2016, leaving around 700 refugees still living in makeshift camps in wooded and secluded areas.
Of the one-in, one-out deal, Max adds: “I don’t know if they will be able to handle the situation any better than they already are today.”
Charlotte Kwantes of Utopia 56, an NGO that aids migrants in France, is not surprised people make the crossing twice despite the risk of death or deportation. “These accords don’t go into the personal reasons why people make these crossings, whether that is their familial situation, or that they are in danger in European countries,” she told The i Paper.
It is a sentiment echoed by Kate O’Neill, Northern France advocacy officer of Project Play, who says the NGO has worked with refugee children as young as three months old who have been tear-gassed by French police. A report published this year by the NGO Human Rights Observers notes several instances of children affected by tear gas as police attempt to stop people boarding boats or to disperse them after they have been stopped. Le Monde has also investigated “aggressive techniques” used by French police to stop refugees boarding boats and found tear gas was a regularly deployed tactic.
French police did not respond to a request for comment on these allegations, but they say their interventions are made to save lives.
“Countless parents,” O’Neill says, “have expressed to me that that this policy will not stop them boarding a small boat with their children because they are not safe in their current position and they feel they have no choice but to continue to the UK to reach safety, and for the sake of their children’s future.”
Seventeen NGOs including Utopia have filed appeals with the Council of State in an attempt to have the agreement struck down on the grounds that it is unconstitutional because it never passed before France’s parliament. The NGOs described the agreement as “shameful”, with a spokesperson for Migrants Shelter telling InfoMigrants the deal was a form of “deeply alarming dehumanisation” and a “barter system in which the commodity is human life”.
The region’s far-right National Rally MP is also opposed to the agreement. Speaking to the BBC in July, Marc de Fleurian, MP for the Pas-de-Calais, said that the deal “might be quite useless actually”.
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He claimed it was “not dealing with the core of the matter. The first thing we need to do in France is to implement the illegal stay offence, which is that all undocumented migrants, all illegal migrants, have to be detained […] Saying for the French part that we are going to welcome back all the illegal migrants that made it across the Channel is not good for us”.
But despite criticisms and a legal challenge, the French government shows no sign of repealing what its LegiFrance website calls an “experimental measure”.
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