1/29/2019 Paris.France Under the bridges of Paris
Broken Swedish is spoken in the tents underneath the yovers of northern Paris. This is what young boys ee to after receiving their deportation order instead of being forced to return to Afghanistan.
The camp is near Porte de la Chapelle on the outskirts of central Paris. It is just one of many similar places where people who exist on the margins of society live. Robbery at knifepoint is common. Western European drug addicts stagger around among
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Afghan teenagers, Central African families with small children wrapped in blankets and prostitutes operate in the open.
While Sweden expels about seventy per cent of all asylum seekers from Afghanistan, France offer refuge to about seventy per cent. That is why so many Afghans – not only young boys, but entire families with small children – make their way to France. The noise of the traf c never ceases. The air reeks of open res fed with anything from cardboard, bits of wood and old furniture to discarded plastic. Nobody knows exactly how many have left Sweden along this route, maybe a thousand or more over the past year. It is likely, however, that their ngerprints are in the system and that the French authorities will discover that they have already applied for and been denied residence status or asylum in Sweden. According to the EU Commission Dublin Convention they can therefore be sent back to Sweden. Photo: Åke Ericson