It’s 6.30 a.m. on a late summer morning in Paris. Amid the rumbling coming from the Stalingrad Métro station, in the northeast of the French capital, hundreds of migrants, mostly men, sleep crammed under an overpass. Some rest on pieces of cardboard and old mattresses behind a urine-doused fence, others lie awake by the side of the street.
This isn’t as disastrous as it sounds, even if it still sucks. France has social services capable of handling this, but the problem is that it dumps these folks on smaller towns where they probably have lost whatever meager social networks and support they might have built in Paris, and will probably face little welcome where they end up.
They do this stuff in the US to punt the homeless out of wherever, send them wherever, and where they land has no social services for them when they get there. Then that municipality gets tired of it and evicts them to the next place.
This isn’t as disastrous as it sounds, even if it still sucks. France has social services capable of handling this, but the problem is that it dumps these folks on smaller towns where they probably have lost whatever meager social networks and support they might have built in Paris, and will probably face little welcome where they end up.
They do this stuff in the US to punt the homeless out of wherever, send them wherever, and where they land has no social services for them when they get there. Then that municipality gets tired of it and evicts them to the next place.
They did it in Sydney in 2000. I was working in Katoomba 2 hrs West of Sydney where they’d moved all the homeless and crazies