Young migrants in Paris say ‘We’re fighting and we’re winning’

Thomas Foster reports from Paris where young undocumented migrants are occupying public buildings to win their right to accommodation, schooling, health—and human dignity

Young undocumented migrants celebrating their wins over the state 

(Picture: Belleville Park Youth Collective)

SOCIALIST WORKER
Friday 29 November 2024

Thousands of migrant children live unaccompanied on the streets of Paris running from traumas in their home countries—and now running from the city’s cops.

In France, they find the authorities are ranged against them. As black and brown people overwhelmingly from Africa and the Middle East, the state instantly regards them as a threat.

But these undocumented migrants have now organised themselves, are fighting back—and they are winning. They occupy council-owned buildings to demand accommodation, hold their own general assemblies and plan for their futures.

“Words are beautiful, but you have to act,” one undocumented migrant told an anti-racist assembly in Paris last week.

“It’s a fight for our rights as we can put pressure on the city council to provide us with accommodation,” one young migrant told Socialist Worker.

“Once a building is occupied, all activities inside it stop. That means the Paris council doesn’t earn any money. If the money doesn’t come in, they’re in trouble. We have power over them because we occupy.”

Another young migrant told Socialist Worker, “Through our passion for action and militancy, we’ve won around 800 to 900 accommodation places. We’ve got young people off the streets.”

Last year, around 475 unaccompanied minors were living in tents in Belleville Park in a working class neighbourhood in the east of Paris. Some only had blankets to brave the cold Parisian nights

On 19 October 2023, the Paris police organised an operation to “shelter” the young migrants. At 4am, the cops tore into the park and pressed people up against the gates until buses arrived to take them away.

Police took them to temporary accommodations all across Paris where they were sheltered for 30 days. After that, they were let out and made homeless once again. Many returned to the park as the place they knew best and began meeting with local activists, discussing what could be done.

That’s when around 20 young migrants decided to occupy a community centre to demand shelter. One of them declared during the occupation, “We are here and we will stick together until the end. We are going to fight.”

After five hours of occupation, the local authority arrived to negotiate and opened up housing places. Kahina, an anti-racist activist involved in the organisation, said, “It happened not because the local authority wanted it to, but because of the strength of our campaign.

“That’s how the Belleville Park Youth Collective began. They chose the name so as not to forget how it started.”

It’s a marked difference from the police’s round-up that forced the young migrants into centres across Paris. Instead, it is young migrants fighting for control over their lives, where they are the ones with agency.

Many of the young migrants felt that they had to fight.

One told Socialist Worker, “When we arrived here in France, many of us thought that that was the end of the journey. We thought that the state would take care of us. But in reality, the opposite was true. The state abandoned us.

“That’s why we have to organise ourselves. We have to fight for our rights and it is through our collective strength that we can win.”

The Belleville Park Youth Collective started meeting twice a week to talk about what they could do. Initially, they mostly organised protests. “There are a lot of logistics with occupations. They are quite complicated, so we didn’t do them every day,” Kahina said.

But during one demonstration organised by the Collective outside of the Paris city hall, the police swept in. They dismantled camps of homeless migrants next to the River Seine, which runs through the centre of Paris.

“When the state takes away what little you have, what choice is there but to resist?” one young migrant said. “The attitude in the moment was—many of us have nowhere to go so let’s occupy.”

There was a building, owned by the Paris council, near to where the young migrants had gathered. Its door was open. They entered the building—and after two hours 150 unaccompanied minors were inside.

Kahina said “it was a huge challenge”. “We held our first general assembly with everyone there,” she explained. “The unaccompanied minors that were already involved explained the situation to others, the reason why they were doing this action and what they wanted to win.

“Their attitude was—we are the ones living on the streets and now we are organising together. And now you, the council, are going to talk to us—that was the end goal.”

The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hildago from the Labour-type PS, sent a team to negotiate. Six unaccompanied minors representing different homeless camps and two local activists met with the officials.

The Paris council was desperate to use the building the next day. So by the evening, it had opened up gymnasiums across Paris for the young migrants to live in.

As a result of a number of occupations led by the Belleville Park Youth Collective, hundreds of young migrants are now housed in gymnasiums. Many then go on to secure a permanent housing place or enter child protection services.

Once in a gymnasium, the young people can begin the process of getting a certificate of accommodation they need to attend school. And the Collective regularly demonstrated outside of Paris’ education authority to ensure that it happened.

A general assembly of Belleville Park Youth Collective (Picture: Socialist Worker)

One young migrant told the Belleville Park Youth Collective general assembly last Tuesday, “When you arrive in Paris, people tell you that you should be in school. But it is very difficult to get to school.

“If there are unaccompanied minors in school, it is because of our struggle and our determination. Today we have more than 160 young people in various secondary schools.”

He added, “Everyone must have the right to school. Everyone, all the young people. When you leave here today, tell all the young people who want to go to school that we are making progress.”

The Collective holds general assemblies every week where hundreds of young migrants come to organise. They hold their discussions in French, but some of the migrants are only now learning the language.

Up to 100 young people attended the assembly last Tuesday. The meeting was made up of a number of different contributions—anyone can come to the front and speak.

There was a report from a recent protest on International Children’s Day, a contribution about recent struggles with getting transport to school, a call to arms for everyone to work together.

There was also a contribution about the racism one of the young migrants experienced in healthcare—something the Collective is trying to tackle.

“If a young person comes to hospital because he is ill, he’s forced to be accompanied by an adult or told that he can’t go,” one migrant told Socialist Worker.

“If a young person is sick in the gym, they often don’t get the medical treatment they need. If they even see you, it is only for a couple of minutes where they give you painkillers.”

In March this year, there were still hundreds of unaccompanied minors living outside on the streets.

The Collective decided to organise an occupation and visited a number of potential buildings. They asked, is it warm? Is it possible to sleep in? Are there toilets? They chose a large building owned by the city council near a football stadium.

The Youth Collective pretended to be organising a football match, spreading the word to come to the stadium at a particular time.

Around 70 people gathered and then entered the building. “We handed out papers to everyone in the building saying why we were here and what we were doing,” Kahina said. “The point is that the people in the building support us.

“The unaccompanied minors kept coming, they all knew each other and were calling their friends to come.”

The building door was shut, but people kept arriving outside. When the negotiations started, the council asked the migrants to leave the main building. But, if authorities agreed to provide housing, those still outside wouldn’t have gotten it.

“The unaccompanied minors said they would move out of the main room only if the doors opened for the others,” Kahina said.

That’s exactly what happened—the local authorities opened the door and over 50 more unaccompanied minors streamed into the building. “The whole neighbourhood came and supported us, bringing us food,” said Kahina.

The occupation lasted for one night. The next day, they won around 160 housing places in gymnasiums.

Occupying buildings owned by the city council has pressurised politicians to find solutions

The following month the Collective staged their longest occupation, which lasted three months. Kahina said, “After we won, many young people who weren’t previously involved came to the weekly general assembly.”

These young people were regularly attending the general assembly and the Collective felt prepared to carry out another occupation. Around 260 people were involved at the peak.

In this occupation, the Collective demanded not only housing for the homeless young people. There was a real threat that authorities would move the 400 people who were already in gymnasiums out of Paris ahead of the Olympic Games.

The council quickly conceded to not move anyone out of the gymnasiums, but refused to provide any more housing.

In response, the young migrants refused to leave. Kahina said, “There were discussions twice a day, where we held a general assembly to discuss what we were doing at that moment.”

Two of the main questions are where can get food and blankets.

“We contacted a number of organisations that we knew who helped to provide food on different days of the week. We organised a whole plan of who is going to provide food at what time,” she said.

Every day, a different handful of the young migrants were responsible for handing out the food. And they got in contact with a French refugee charity, Utopia 56, who brought a number of blankets.

Eventually, the city council conceded and opened up more gymnasiums.

Another young migrant told Socialist Worker, “We feel completely alone here in France. If you don’t resist, people will walk all over you. So you have to rise up, be courageous and fight for your rights as a migrant and as a human being, and especially if you are young.”

She said occupations mean the “authorities are obliged to come and discuss with us, to see the young person and in what situation they live.”

The struggle has transformed those involved. “Since starting to fight, my mindset has changed,” one unaccompanied minor told Socialist Worker. “Before I was sleeping rough on the streets.

“Every day you wake up, try to find a place just to get some rest and find somewhere warm. Every day it was the same.

“But by struggling to win some of our rights, you no longer have to worry about that every single day. Our struggle won us housing and then the rights to go to school. It is a step towards us building an actual life.”

Young undocumented migrants are taking the fight for accommodation into their own hands

France’s neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron pushed vicious attacks on migrants—including a new law to clamp down on undocumented migrants. This has fuelled the rise of Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN), which then pulls Macron’s government further to the right as it tries to compete.

And, since Macron installed a right wing Tory government without a majority, the fascists are the kingmakers in parliament.

The Collective recognises that the political situation means fighting for migrants’ rights is even more urgent.

One local activist argued that the RN “is in a position to take office if nothing is done”. “New laws are set to be introduced that could make life even more difficult for our undocumented comrades,” they said.

Another local activist described it as “a war”, saying, “We need direct confrontation with the government and the fascists. We don’t just talk about why we don’t like racism and why it’s nasty.

“We have to talk about confrontation—getting organised to fight for the rights of undocumented migrants.”

One young migrant attacked the French state and its colonialism. He said that the French elites “are paying for wars in Africa and then they don’t want us to come here”.

“You created the misery over there, the wars. People are going to come here because you’ve created conditions that are not favourable. They have to flee because of the wars, trying to escape their misery to get here to Europe.”

When the Belleville Park Youth Collective started, other organisations doubted whether migrant self-organising was possible. But one young person said their success “showed how we can go beyond what we were doing previously”.

And the fight is spreading. “Other organisations have come to Paris to visit us. This leads to collectives being formed in other regions that have fought for and won accommodation places,” said one speaker at a general assembly last week.

The migrants’ victories “are due to struggle, because they have started to be militant and impose themselves”.

As one young migrant told Socialist Worker, “What we did here in Paris has enabled others in Marseille, Lille, Toulouse, Bois, Blanc, Clermont-Ferrand to form collectives to fight and assert their own rights.

“Our struggle becomes a struggle that will spread all throughout France—a method that all unaccompanied minors can use.”

He added, “We can change our own destiny. We aren’t just children. We weren’t born to sleep rough. If the young people in Paris are able to change things, then others can do the same.

“The struggle here has made a difference to the young people who were sleeping rough in other cities. They have been able to stand on their own two feet and challenge the various institutions.”

What the defiance, courage and creativity of young undocumented migrants in Paris shows is that resistance can erupt in the most unpromising of circumstances. It shows that undocumented migrants aren’t just victims of a broken system—but have agency.

As one young migrant said in an occupation, “Before we were alone. Now we are not alone. We are together—and we will win.”