Four plates balanced on a tray, Fatimata M. describes with a big smile her arrival in the former Formula 1 hotel in Beaucouzé (Maine-et-Loire), near Angers, with her husband and three children. ” They [les travailleurs sociaux] helped us with shopping, gave clothes, toys for the children, diapers for the baby”, says the 31-year-old Algerian, who has been in France for six years and who hopes for regularization. After twenty days of sleeping on the street in Paris, she agreed to board a bus to this “regional reception area” for Ile-de-France migrants on Tuesday February 6.
Selvakumar D., who has finished eating the rice and chicken offered this evening by an association, says he has already “a few less problems” since his arrival. The 30-year-old Sri Lankan asylum seeker shows the soles of his feet, frozen and painful upon his arrival, after several nights in a camp under the Charles-de-Gaulle bridge in Paris.
For Fatimata and Selvakumar, the airlock kept its first promise. Since April 2023, these centers have been set up by the State in ten regions to relieve emergency accommodation in Ile-de-France. They have already welcomed “3,600 people who lived on the streets, in urban camps or in squats”we declare to the interministerial delegation for accommodation and access to housing. “Above all, an airlock allows vulnerable people to be sheltered, and to offer them administrative, but also medical, social and psychological support”says Pierre Joseph, of the France Terre d’Asile association, which manages it.
These airlocks often represent, due to a lack of sufficient infrastructure apart from emergency reception, “the first accommodation offer made to them” explains Paul Alauzy, coordinator at Médecins du monde. However, the system “limits itself above all to hiding poverty in the region before the Olympic Games”estimates the man who is also spokesperson for the collective Le Revers de la Medal.
“Social cleansing”
In October 2023, this collective, which brings together 70 associations, including Emmaüs and Utopia 56, alerted in an open letter on “the very negative impact” Games on people in situations of exclusion. He says he fears “social cleansing” from Paris. Rights defender Claire Hédon announced in January that she had “self-entry” of these accusations, recurring since spring 2023, and investigate in particular the question of “the invisibilization of undesirables”.
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