French mayors, desperate for help and support as their government continues to allow more and more migrants into their country, have written an open letter to their President Macron. The letter, published in the paper LeMonde (The World), begs for more help.
The mayors say that their small cities have all taken in “several thousand” refugees every month and that it is causing a social emergency that can no longer be ignored. They’re “completed saturated” with these newcomers and are unable to support them as well as their own French born citizens.
In translation, the letter partly reads that the mayors of Lille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Toulouse and Nantes want the national government to set up a “network of solidarity between the cities of France” and that the President must hold meetings “at the highest level” and “without delay” to further discuss this emergency.
The French Interior Ministry has responded to the letter, published this Saturday, proposing that they will mobilize 20,000 housing units by next year in order to balance out the distribution of these refugees across the country and further asks French counties (known as prefects) to begin the work of identifying where migrants are currently living in emergency shelters.
Right now, Germany, Sweden and France are all in chaos for accepting hundreds of thousands of migrants. German authorities reported that “During the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,500 crimes” including rape, physical assaults, stabbings, robbery and drug trafficking. Over 1,000 Swedish police officers have resigned in protest of the migrant crisis and the brutal crimes that came with it. And France, who has been subject to truck attacks and the Bataclan massacre, has turned into grounds for refugee turf wars, ruining previously popular tourist attractions and crushing nightlife.
In October, 50 of 80 police officers working at a migrant detention center in the Parisian suburbs took sick leave to protest the fact that another new unit was being opened, saying that they are not capable of dealing with the detainees. The police said that the detainees smoke all over the building and they know that there are fewer police there to keep an eye on them. The center is in a “shabby state” and hosts a vibrant rodent infestation.
In the spring of this year we wrote that the migrants living in tents in France are blaming the French government for their condition. One man, a 25 year-old from Nigeria (wait, aren’t they all supposed to be migrants escaping from the Middle East or something?) said that the French “prefer seeing us on the streets suffering,” and that passersby are “happy” to see the suffering in the camps.
And if not for the Atlantic ocean, what would keep us from being in the same state?