Illegal Migrants Huddle Along French Coast

Hundreds Camp Out in Hopes of Stowing Away and Reaching Their El Dorado: London

CALAIS, France, Jan. 13 -- He emerged cautiously from behind thick brambles in a grove of scrub oak that Calais residents refer to as "the jungle." Mohammed Mohammedei he called himself, an Afghan on the run.

Mohammedei, 29, shivered in the exceptionally cold weather despite three layers of clothing and a woolen cap. For more than two weeks, he said, he has been camping here on the French coast, angling to stow away aboard one of the dozens of freight trucks that cross the English Channel daily on ferries or through the Chunnel, as the channel tunnel is known.

More than 600 illegal migrants like Mohammedei are backed up this winter in Calais, 150 miles north of Paris, living in makeshift shelters pitched in the patchy snow. They have swollen a floating population of Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Kurds, Eritreans and English-speaking Africans who number more than 1,000 at any given time in a string of communities along France's English Channel coast.

Different tragedies -- most often war -- have driven them from their homelands. But they all have the same goal, Mohammedei said, smiling wanly: London. With a persistence that defies the French and British governments' best efforts to stanch the flow, they have continued to filter through Europe on their way to the city that is considered a migrant's El Dorado.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as interior minister under Jacques Chirac in 2002, thought he had beaten the problem when he closed a Red Cross-run migrant shelter in nearby Sangatte. The shelter, which consisted of tents and cots erected inside a large warehouse, provided free meals, shelter and medical care, which Sarkozy said made it a magnet for people making their way to Britain illegally.

The closure, which provoked an outcry in France, seemed effective for the first months, when the flow slowed to a trickle. But over the past six years, the migrants have gradually returned, resuming their underground travels through southern Europe and stacking up here at the Calais ferry port and tunnel entrance.

"When you add things up, at the end of six years nothing has really changed," said Sylvie Copyans of Association Salam, one of several private charities in Calais that provide the migrants with hot meals, medical care and, when they can, a place to sleep out of the cold.

After an on-the-scene study, the French Coalition for the Right of Asylum, a federation of nongovernmental aid groups, concluded last fall that closing Sangatte made the problem less visible but did not solve it. The group called on the government to recognize that exiles still crowd along the coast and to take steps to ensure they are treated well.

But the political mood was unreceptive. France's Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Development of Solidarity -- whose name betrays the country's difficulty in handling immigration -- announced last week that it had expelled almost 30,000 foreigners without proper visas in 2008. The expulsions, carried out by costly charter flights to Africa and elsewhere, were part of a tightening ordered by Sarkozy -- first as interior minister, then as president -- to make France less attractive as a destination for illegal immigration.

But the migrants' motivation is so strong, particularly in societies that have been ripped apart by war, that those headed for London seem to have missed the message. "It's not El Dorado, that's for sure, but it's always better than the situation in their own countries," Copyans said.

Mohammedei, for instance, said he decided to leave his home town, just south of Kabul, after a grenade tossed by Taliban fighters sent shrapnel into his left calf, knee, thigh and shoulder. Despite the sub-zero temperature, he pulled up a double thickness of pant legs and a layer of long underwear to display the scars to a visitor in the thicket.

"Taliban," he said.