UK Edition
History is repeating itself. Fourteen years after the Sangatte refugee centre was shut, riot police and burning tents have returned to the fields of Calais. Most of the Jungle’s occupants have agreed to leave peacefully, but some activists are vigorously protesting its closure.
As the camp’s squalor and misery show, permanent camps are the worst way to house refugees. In Europe, they’re also unnecessary. For the sake of camp residents and the sanity of French locals, a similar shanty town should never be allowed to spring up again.
The creation of the Jungle, a staging post for illegal attempts to cross the Channel, was effectively sanctioned by France in 2015. A small refugee centre opened outside Calais to house women and children and offer facilities to men. They soon set up camp and authorities turned a blind eye.
Far from being a humane solution, the Jungle was really just a way to get refugees out of the town proper. It succeeded, by setting up a dirty, disease-prone, shanty town rife with crime. It also set up a ridiculous contest between migrants and security providers for the Eurotunnel and port of Calais, forcing lorry drivers to run a gauntlet of would-be stowaways running on to the road. All of this was an attempt to get tough on refugees by shifting them out of Calais squats, thereby making their lives so miserable they would leave. It was an abject failure.
Unfortunately, there are now an estimated 60 million displaced people in the world. That doesn’t include the millions on the move for economic reasons. Populations are growing and conflicts are widespread. We are in a new historic era of great migration, whether we like it or not.
A few years ago, the UN Refugee Agency recognised that the rising numbers called for a new approach to how countries handle large influxes of refugees. For the first time, it developed a policy on “alternatives to camps”. It recommended that refugees be settled in existing towns and cities, rather than forming massive, supposedly temporary encampments that often become permanent outposts cut off from normal society.
The policy was, of course, aimed at countries with many more refugees than European countries host. But France should have taken note. Letting people live for years in camps with no basic amenities, no ability to support themselves and, in the Jungle’s case, no intention of entering the formal system for processing refugees, is intolerable to locals and miserable for camp residents.
It allows an isolated sub-population to take root in a country without participating in any of the normal rights and responsibilities of living there. Allowing this temporarily might be unavoidable for some populations stranded on the edge of horrendous war zones, but it’s certainly not necessary in Europe.
Each EU country has a system for assessing asylum claims. Once a person applies for refugee status, they’re given housing and some form of subsistence until authorities reach a decision. This might be unpopular among locals, but it’s better than the alternative and isn’t luxurious – Germany is putting up some refugees in the former Dachau concentration camp. Those who refuse to apply for asylum should be deported. Tolerating informal camps like the Jungle instead poisons relations between migrants and locals.
The massive influx into Europe is an example of what happens when governments apply tough conditions to refugees in the hope that they’ll go away. More than two million displaced people, mostly Syrian, found themselves in Turkey several years before they decided to try their luck in Europe. What drove many of them westwards was the experience of spending months and years isolated from normal society, dependent on handouts and with no prospect of education for their children nor any prospect of earning a living.
There is now, finally, a belated push to improve that situation. The UK and EU want Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, which together host four million refugees, to give out work permits in return for aid and favourable trading terms. This is exactly the right use of Britain’s aid budget and should have been tried earlier. Allowing Syrians to stay near their country and work has the added advantage that, when the devastating war ends, as it must eventually, there will still be a local population in the region keen to return and rebuild the country.
Fortunately for Britain, it’s not facing the prospect of hosting millions of refugees. The UK receives just 3 per cent of all asylum applications in Europe and last year accepted about 11,000. That amounts to under 2 per cent of total immigration to the UK. As the descendant of Jews, some of whom fled pogroms at one point or another, I’d rather we cut immigration to take more refugees.
But even if we don’t, Britain should be at the forefront of finding better, more efficient ways to process applications, integrate refugees and deport those who are rejected. It might be upsetting for Lily Allen and charity workers in Calais to see it dismantled, but the Jungle is not a solution to anything.
The Calais Jungle is a disgrace and must never be allowed to rise again