Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crossing to Britain has become all but impossible over the years, as British immigration officials have increasingly tightened security, using sniffer dogs and carbon-dioxide detectors in the ports. As a result, thousands of immigrants have found themselves stranded along the French coast, living with little sanitation or clean water...
Unlike most of Europe's illegal immigrants, the men in the makeshift camp known as "the Jungle" near the French port of Calais have hardly kept out of sight of the locals. Surviving under leaky plastic sheeting amid discarded food and dirty clothing, the men - most of whom fled desperate violence and poverty - have spent months, sometimes even years, as the most visible challenges to, and victims of, Europe's tangled immigration laws...
...Jungle lived up to its name on Tuesday as hundreds of French riot police stormed the camp and arrested 278 people - almost all Afghan, and nearly half of them children. The French government says the raid was a much-needed crackdown on human traffickers. But even as police were leading immigrants out of the camp, refugee organizations warned that the action would do little to deter desperate people from making the hazardous journey across Europe, and instead blamed French officials for failing to deal with them. "The French government has effectively washed its hands of the problem and deliberately held...
...rail-thin 12-year-old from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, who said his father sold a piece of land to pay smugglers to take him and his cousin, also 12, to Europe, after Taliban fighters had repeatedly tried to press the boys into fighting with them. French Immigration Minister Eric Besson said on Tuesday that the 132 children arrested would be housed in special immigration youth centers until officials determined whether they qualified for asylum. In the camp on Monday Jabar described how he and his cousin hid in container trucks for six weeks across Turkey, Greece, Italy...
...dilemma facing France, and Europe more generally, is a difficult one - not least because about 1,800 other illegal immigrants are still hiding under bridges, in abandoned buildings or in the woods elsewhere on the French coast. Under European law, refugees are required to settle in the first E.U. country in which they land. For the thousands fleeing Afghanistan and Iraq, that usually means Greece, where the government grants asylum to only about 1% of refugees. "There are huge, huge differences between countries in the chance of being recognized as a refugee," says Wilbert van Hövell, regional representative...