Solène Leroux with AFP
modified to
6:15 p.m., March 10, 2022
New “waves” to come: the government anticipates the massive arrival in France in the coming weeks of 50,000 to 100,000 people fleeing the conflict in Ukraine, a scenario which requires resizing the planned reception system. Of the more than 2.1 million displaced due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, “nearly 7,500 people from Ukraine have arrived on national territory, an increase of 3,000 for two days. , especially many women with children”, explained Gérald Darmanin at the microphone of Europe 1, adding that 25,000 reception places are already ready for refugees.
The Minister of the Interior asked the prefect Joseph Zimet, who leads the interministerial crisis unit (CIC), “to prepare scenarios of anticipation in the event that several tens of thousands of people come to the national territory”, in the idea of ”welcoming them well, in order to be able to house them, to be able to send them to school, to obviously follow them in their care”, but also “to be able to authorize them to work”. And to add: “Obviously, the accommodation and the reception that we will make here will depend a lot on the political and military evolution in Ukraine.”
“Prepare, plan, organize, regulate”
“We are trying to be ready for volumes which will probably be much more significant in the days or weeks to come,” said Joseph Zimet, during a press conference at the Ministry of the Interior. “We must anticipate to be ready if necessary to welcome 50,000, perhaps 100,000 refugees,” he said after the first meeting of the CIC. “We must prepare, plan, organize, regulate the system and already identify the accommodation capacities” to be able to accommodate, explained the former communications adviser to Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée.
After a “first wave” of people fleeing Ukraine who “joined people in Europe” because they had relatives there, “we anticipate a second and a third wave of people who will be more destitute refugees” and who will be able to live less rely on accommodation with their relatives, underlined Joseph Zimet.
Some 18,000 Ukrainian residence permits in France
“There will be new approaches to develop, a huge planning work to undertake.” At this stage, declared a few hours earlier the Minister Delegate for Citizenship Marlène Schiappa to some journalists, “we can cope, there is no shortage of housing”. According to border police reports, 7,251 people, including 6,967 Ukrainians, were on French soil or had passed through it on Thursday morning and 3,054 of them were receiving care.
But what will happen if these figures increase tenfold, if the government’s assumptions materialize, while the emergency accommodation systems are saturated? “In the migratory wave that is coming towards us, we have to be able to distinguish between the people who are destined to stay and those who are just passing through, in particular to join more substantial communities in the south of Europe”, continued Joseph Zimet. . Italy, for example, hosted a community of about 225,000 Ukrainians before the war, and there were nearly 100,000 in Spain, according to Eurostat data. France, it lists some 18,000 residence permits issued to Ukrainians.
“A country of fixation”
“Until now we were a country of transit. We are going to become more of a country of settlement”, sums up the prefect Zimet. For the moment, these are only projections and “hypotheses”, but already “we see a huge flow” between the countries where Ukrainians have taken massive refuge (in particular more than a million in Poland), via the French diplomatic apparatus, explains the coordinator of the CIC. “We had alerts for example on departures from Germany, Poland” to France, he said. “All this is deciphered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The order placed with the CIC is to produce models for next week” in order to prepare for the reception.
“If Odessa falls”, for example, “it will be another new wave, part of which will come to us”, he still believes. These flows will mainly depend on the evolution of the conflict. The people who have taken the road of exodus “are for many women and children who are waiting for what will become of the fathers, brothers, husbands who fight courageously”, nuanced the boss of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii), during the press conference. “They don’t necessarily all want to go very far” from neighboring countries. “People especially want to leave as soon as possible.”