Lives On Hold
A faulty system to declare asylum in Paris leaves migrants without status and at risk for arrest.
On a frigid January morning, Mariem Kone perched on a plastic chair in the back of a sunlit room. Balancing her cell phone in her lap, she turned her attention to a baby next to her fussing in a harness on her mother’s chest.
The baby, an infant named Zara, gurgled and whimpered in her face. “Wahh,” Mariem echoed back playfully. The mother wiggled Zara out of the harness and lifted her shirt to breastfeed. Next to them, the mother’s friend, Masta Kone (unrelated to Mariem), juggled a newborn, a bottle, and a pink cell phone.
As the clock approached 10 a.m., a tall lanky African man stood in front of the women and some two dozen others around them and held a laminated sign with large black numbers printed on it above his head.
It listed a phone number for a hotline that, as of last May, migrants in the Île-de-France region are required to call to secure an appointment to declare asylum. The women had come to Cedre, a social centre overseen by nonprofit Secours Catholique, for help making the call.
But advocates and migrants say the hotline is riddled with practical and technical glitches. A shortage of appointments and operators leave migrants waiting on hold for hours. Once the week’s appointments are taken, the hotline shuts down, disconnecting people who had been waiting. A recorded message tells other callers in French to try again later.
“If you don’t have access to human beings, it’s a nightmare,” said immigration lawyer Elodie Journeau. “OFII is moving more and more to computers, but if there is lockdown, the computers can’t operate themselves.”
The delay isn’t only a matter of administrative inconvenience. Once asylum seekers are registered in the system, they are able to begin receiving social benefits, including a monthly stipend of about 400 euros a month through a government-funded debit card. Until they get through, they’re left in a stateless limbo, with no money or access to healthcare. They’re also not protected against arrest and deportation.
Prior to May, migrants would wait outside of the Paris offices, called “platform for asylum seekers” or PADAs, which oversee the asylum appointments. Representatives at OFII claim the change was made to reduce those long lines. “Since 2 May [2018], the OFII’s multilingual telephone platform in the Ile de France region has made long queues disappear,” the agency said in a statement.
Instead they now queue up outside of advocacy centres, like Cedre, which help asylum seekers navigate the harrowing process. They also give free access to a landline to those who don’t have cell phones or call credits.
The energy that morning was like that of a radio contest, with dozens scrambling to dial fast enough to be at the front of the line on hold. Mariem and Masta tapped the numbers into their cell phones. “Your hold time is 45 minutes,” a recorded voice told them.
And so the waiting began.
That morning, before the centre opened at 9 a.m., a line had snaked along the untamed yard separating Cedre from the busy highway that runs through the Aubervilliers neighborhood in the outskirts of Paris. When the doors opened, about three dozen migrants — mostly men — filed in and crowded around tables covered in bright African fabrics and sipped coffee from chestnut-stained plastic cups.
“We’re not affiliated with the police,” said a volunteer, flanked by two associates who repeated his speech in French and Arabic.
Most had arrived that morning hoping to take their shot at the hotline, crowding in the back room with the three African women. Some came to collect mail or request assistance with administrative problems relating to their status. Others just wanted a hot drink, fresh baguette, and good company. While waiting, the three women remained upbeat, switching off babies and making small talk.
Masta had left her home country of Côte d’Ivoire while in the third trimester of her pregnancy. She hoped to give her daughter, Vivia, a better life in Europe. But the onerous two-month journey, which took her mostly by foot through Mali, Algeria, and Morocco, was hard on her body. She gave birth to Vivia in Spain before packing up again and completing the last leg of the trip to Paris in December.
After almost an hour, Masta and her friend were connected with an operator. The friend slipped into an empty office, pressing the phone against her ear and leaning against it as she struggled to hear. Masta watched through the window, cradling Vivia. Moments later, her friend came out again, looking defeated. She hadn’t been able to understand the operator, so a translator needed to call her back. Although OFII claims the hotline is available in 11 major languages and various African dialects, accommodating individual callers adds a step to the process.
Their wait began again.
The process is so unreliable that last year, a group of immigration lawyers, social advocates, and two dozen migrants filed a petition with Paris’s Administrative Court. One nonprofit, Cimade, analyzed the number of calls made into the hotline between May and December 2018 and compared them to the number that were answered. They found only 10.8 percent of calls were handled by an operator.
In November, the court ruled in their favor, saying “these circumstances constituted a manifestly serious and unlawful infringement of the right to asylum.”
The law dates back to 1951, when 146 countries, including France, signed the Geneva Convention as a way to resettle refugees after World War II. It stated individuals could request refugee status if they were persecuted in their home country because of their race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group or political opinion. In 1967, those countries were joined by the United States and Venezuela to sign a protocol continuing those protections.
The judge demanded that OFII increase appointments from 81 to 100 per day and make other improvements to the service. But advocates say it’s still hardly enough to accommodate the thousands who declare asylum in the region each year.
In 2019, France reported 128,940 asylum applicants, about 10,000 more than the year before. Most individuals come from Afghanistan, Albania, Georgia, Guinea, and Bangladesh, according to the latest data from France’s Office of Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. About 36 percent live in the Île-de-France region.
“They are trying to make it hard,” said Motiur Rahman, a Bangladeshi migrant who volunteers at Cedre. “They make it harder and harder, day by day.”
As the volunteers mingled among the migrants, the two phones in an empty office sat on hold with the hotline. Thirty-five minutes, one screen displayed. People without cell phones added their name to a list and one at a time were given the office phone after an operator picked up. Women and families are given priority.
A resounding complaint about the hotline is that the number is not free, so each call takes a portion of a migrants’ already tight budget. Cedre dedicates two of its landlines to the hotline three days a week. But because the wait times are upwards of an hour, only four or five people are able to get through on each line during the five and a half hours the hotline operates. A landline in an empty office at Cedre waits on hold with the hotline. Once it’s answered, the next person in line on a sign-up sheet will be called.
Those who don’t know about the social centres are left to their own resources.
Muhammed, a Syrian photojournalist who asked not to use his last name, arrived in France last July. He had spent a year traveling here, including paying a smuggler to sneak him across the Syrian border into Turkey and flying to France. But it would be another stressful two months before he’d be able to get an appointment to declare asylum.
He paid 45 euros for a prepaid cell phone plan that gave him an hour of calling time — not nearly enough to get through to the hotline. After that expired, he used his friends’ phones. For the next two months, his daily routine revolved around trying to get through to a representative, being disconnected or left on hold for hours at a time.
“What if I didn’t have these friends here?” Mohammed said. “What would I do?”
Immigration lawyer Richard Joory, who was involved in the legal complaint against OFII, said the delay in reaching operators puts migrants at risk of losing their case for asylum and being returned to their home countries. “Many asylum seekers are placed in administrative retention centres before being able to contact the OFII platform and make their asylum request registered,” he said.
Once arrested, migrants are still able to declare asylum, but at that point their claim is rarely approved, Joory said.
“There’s no real help for them to prepare for the interview, and the interview [is] by video usually,” he said. “The rate of positive decisions is very low.”
He recalled some migrants had been arrested near Resto de Coeur, a nonprofit that provides hot meals to those in need. They were on their way to pick up food after failed attempts to reach the hotline at Cedre. When police asked for proof of status, they couldn’t provide it.
By the end of the day at Cedre, 18 people had secured appointments, a number that volunteer Rahman says is “very rare” and much higher than usual.
Mariem was one of the lucky ones. Shortly after hanging up with the operator, she received a text giving the details for her appointment at 10:30 a.m. the next day. Her two new friends, who also got an appointment, had already left with their babies.
Clutching printed-out directions from her home in Livry-Gargan, a commune about 12 kilometres outside of Paris, to the appointment centre, she looked a mix of relieved and exasperated.
“I have to travel an hour,” she said, waving the papers.
She let out a groan that broke into a laugh, and spun toward the exit.
Update: As of mid-March 2020, when the nationwide lockdown was put into effect due to Covid-19, the platform has been completely shut down.