France rules out new Calais welcome centre as Emmanuel Macron blows hot and cold over migrants

France's interior minister yesterday (Fri) ruled out creating a welcome center for migrants in Calais and pledged to deploy extra riot police amid rising tensions at the northern French port.

Gérard Collomb's tough comments came a day after President Emmanuel Macron called for "the greatest humanity" in dealing with the migrant issue, including speeding up the asylum request process from over a year to six months.

That prompted one paper to suggest the pair were playing "good cop bad cop" over the issue. In another sign of his ambivalence, Mr Macron praised Angela Merkel's decision to receive hundreds of thousands of migrants in his electoral campaign, but has not pledged to take any more himself.

In his first trip to Calais, Mr Collomb said he wanted to avoid the area becoming an "abcess" that would lure migrants eight months after the dismantling of the notorious "Jungle", a makeshift camp from where around 10,000 tried to sneak into Britain on trucks, ferries or trains.

Since then several hundred - mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans -have returned to the port, where tensions rose this week when a Polish driver was killed when his truck burst into flames after hitting a roadblock, set up by migrants hoping to slow down traffic to jump onto vehicles.

Taking a tough line, Mr Collomb said: "We've seen this before, it starts with a few hundred people and ends with several thousand people who we can't manage.

"That's why we don't want a centre here.," he added, after meeting with security forces, officials and aid workers in Calais. 

Instead,, he insisted, "we are going to reinforce security with the arrival of two additional mobile security force units to stop any new camps from forming."

Mr Collomb pledged to present Mr Macron with a plan for asylum reforms in the next two weeks, vowing in particular to tackle African people-smuggling networks at their root.

Eleven charities went to court on Wednesday demanding the construction of a government refugee centre in Calais, deploring the miserable conditions in which migrants find themselves.

The country's human rights watchdog also denounced "inhuman living conditions" facing migrants.

Rejecting the proposal, Mr Collomb irked aid groups by saying that a new centre would create an "abcess" that would fester.

"These people are not a disease, they are not dirt. They are men and women who have made a very difficult journey to flee their countries for reasons we all know about," said Hicham Aly, an aid worker at the Secours Catholique charity.

Mr Collomb argued that past experience showed that any official asylum facility in Calais would quickly be swamped with arrivals, leaving authorities unable to cope.

"I'm suspicious of centres that are supposedly ready to welcome migrants for only a few days who end up staying for a long time," he said.

On Thursday, he appeared to rule out scrapping UK border controls on French soil, but said Britain must pay more towards handling illegal migrants seeking to cross the Channel.

"To return the border to England would be complex," he told Le Figaro. "It would block the functioning of the tunnel."

"However, we will have to find more favourable conditions regarding responsibility for a certain number of costs in France," he added. 

Mr Macron this week also said that "cooperation must evolve" between the UK and France, without going into more detail.