Cars driving through UK Border Control checkpoints at Calais ferry port in France
An Ethiopian man has died after being hit by a lorry near Calais as hundreds of migrants desperate to reach Britain return to the French port three months after the “Jungle” camp was bulldozed.
The 20-year-old, killed on a motorway leading to the port on Saturday, was the first migrant known to have died in an apparent attempt to board a UK-bound vehicle in the area since Europe’s largest migrants’ camp was razed in October.
As many as 50 migrants are estimated to be arriving in Calais each day, Frédéric Baland, a police union spokesman, said. About 400 are now in the area, according to aid workers and local sources.
“Dismantling the camp has not stopped the flow of migrants in Calais,” Mr Baland said. “We’ve gone back to the same situation we had here three or four years ago, with small groups scattered in the town. We estimate the number of daily arrivals at between 30 and 50.”
Instead of setting up another camp, they are staying in small groups, sleeping rough in fields or wasteland on the edges of the town.
Police say they are enforcing a “zero-tolerance policy”, rounding up migrants and sending them to be processed at official centres in other towns.
After the death on Saturday, Calais authorities tried to downplay the influx. “It is not because of this tragic accident that we can talk about the return of migrants to Calais,” an official at the regional Préfecture said.
When the “Jungle” was cleared, thousands of young men, mainly Africans, Afghans and Arabs, were bussed to official accommodation centres around France. Some have taken up the government’s offer to seek asylum in France, but many remain determined to join relatives or friends in Britain.
Source: The Telegraph
