CHAMPTERCIER, France — Residents of Champtercier fear their hamlet in the foothills of the Alps is about to become a new flashpoint for Europe’s migrant crisis: Its population of 800 is slated to grow sharply when it takes in 100 migrants from acamp in Calais next month.
Hundreds of suspicious residents are petitioning to keep the newcomers out and a minor presidential candidate has taken up their cause. Similar resistance has surfaced in other towns as the government prepares to shut the Calais camp and send as many as 9,000 migrants to 164 sites around France where they can apply for asylum and get shelter, food and medical care.
The mayor, who agreed to accommodate the migrants in a shuttered vacation resort on the edge of Champtercier, is distraught at what she sees as an irrational, overblown reaction.
“It’s a question of humanity, a question of solidarity toward Calais, toward those people who are victims. They are victims first of war, of trafficking, of all they had to live through” in Calais, Mayor Regine Ailhaud-Blanc told Associated Press.
The mayor remains committed to the idea of helping those in the so-called jungle camp in Calais, a filthy slum home to a growing population of migrants from the Mideast and Africa trying to reach Britain. The camp has become a symbol of Europe’s botched response to the migrant crisis, and a disgrace for the government of France.
So the government is sending the migrants to places like Champtercier, nearly 600 miles away. Those who come here will not be in the center of town but in a cluster of small buildings and bungalows unused since 2010.
Panicked about the arriving migrants, Champtercier’s residents created a Facebook page and online petition to ask the mayor to reject the migrants, due to arrive Oct. 15. The center’s management company, Villages Club du Soleil, will receive 18 euros a day to care for each migrant, according to the administration.
The town hall and regional administration held a meeting Monday to address the concerns. Instead of calming tensions, the meeting turned into a forum for expressing fear and hatred of migrants. Anti-Muslim sentiment was pervasive. Many complained that taxpayer money would go to foreigners instead of needy French people.
