A decade after Calais camp demolition, migrants continue wandering France’s northern coast

In October 2016, officials began tearing down the sprawling informal settlement on Calais’s outskirts that had attracted people from Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria and Iraq. A decade later, the site no longer serves as the emblem of the Euro-Mediterranean migration crisis, a description once used by former interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve. Despite intensified security cooperation between France and the United Kingdom, attempts to cross the Channel persist.

Calais, the last Schengen frontier before the English coast, continues to draw migrants who rely on maritime links and the Channel tunnel. The heightened controls have reshaped the geography of exile, pushing migrants into a more precarious, itinerant pattern along the northern French shoreline.