A silent exodus

By: Emilio Di Stefano, August 2023

In Paris’s 19th arrondissement lies the Stalingrad metro station. Named in memory of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, in which nearly two million people died, the name hardly evokes positive associations. Today, the station is home to hundreds of homeless people in Paris, both Parisians and migrants.

Under the metro bridges, they seek shelter from the rain and sleep on mattresses passed down from other homeless people. For the migrants, the mattresses are often used for a few weeks, sometimes longer, while they wait for the French authorities to arrange housing. When they move on, the mattress is left behind and becomes someone else’s good fortune — or at least someone else’s protection from the cold, hard ground.

It used to be common for migrants to sleep in tents, and individual tents are still a familiar sight in Paris. But the large tent camps that once housed hundreds of migrants in the Porte de la Chapelle and Porte d’Aubervilliers areas were dismantled by police several years ago and have not reappeared.

We had heard that several migrants who had previously lived in Sweden were now sleeping rough in Stalingrad, so on a cold evening at the end of April, my photographer Alessandro Berellini and I made our way there. Near the station, we met people lying on dirty mattresses, wrapped in sleeping bags and blankets. With the help of our interpreter and colleague Alireza Naghavi, we walked around trying to make contact.

“The first time I came here, I was very scared. I told the French authorities that I couldn’t live here, but they said I had to because there was no alternative.”

The system on the street resembles something many people will recognise from American prison films. Different ethnic groups occupy different areas beneath the bridges, separated by clear, if invisible, boundaries that are generally respected. At night, they take turns keeping watch. Someone always has to stay awake to make sure no stranger from the wrong group crosses the line. It is the kind of place where anyone would sleep with one eye open.

The day after we met Mostafa, he was robbed by a group in broad daylight while on his way to a meeting with the French migration authorities.

They tore his backpack from him, kicked him and ran off. The few belongings he had brought with him to Paris had become even fewer. He told us that he wanted to become an artist or a tattooist. On the underside of his left arm, he had a large cross that he had tattooed on himself with impressive precision. We decided to buy him some pens and a sketchbook as a gift for taking the time to speak with us. He was grateful, but also asked anxiously: where was he supposed to keep them so they would not be stolen?

The bridge at Stalingrad would remain Mostafa’s home for another couple of weeks before the French authorities arranged accommodation for him.

A few days later, we meet another young man who has also spent several years living in Sweden. We can call him Farid. Farid came to Paris a couple of years ago. He slept in a tent on the street before, after about a month, being given accommodation by the authorities.

When he applied for a residence permit in France, his case became subject to the Dublin Regulation, meaning that under the rules, Sweden — as the first country in which he had applied for asylum — was responsible for handling his application, not France. Farid was therefore supposed to be sent back to Sweden, where a deportation order to Afghanistan was waiting for him.

Rather than comply with the decision, Farid left his accommodation and returned to living on the street. His mental health deteriorated severely and he began using heroin. On his arms and hands are traces of self-harm: pale circular scars left by cigarette burns. He explains that he does it to relieve the anxiety.

In Sweden, he says, he had dreams of a normal life. But the asylum processes have worn him down, and those dreams have been reduced to a struggle for survival. For the past six months, he has been living on the street, and in addition to the cigarette burns, his body bears scars from several knife fights he has been involved in.

“It’s a fucking miserable life, but what can you do?”

Although many Swedish-speaking migrants manage to build new lives, the truth is that this is not the case for everyone. Some end up struggling with addiction or crime, and some take their own lives under the immense pressure of living in constant displacement.

In 2015, just over 160,000 people applied for asylum in Sweden. Around 25,000 were unaccompanied children and young people from Afghanistan. Many were granted residence permits, but many also spent a large part of their teenage years in Sweden before the Swedish Migration Agency decided that they should be deported.

In France, it has proven easier to obtain a residence permit than in Sweden. As a result, many choose to move on to Paris rather than live undocumented in Sweden. The alternative is deportation to Afghanistan, but since the Taliban took power in the summer of 2021, Sweden has not been able to carry out deportations there. Instead, those whose applications have been rejected end up in an impossible limbo, unable either to obtain a residence permit or to be deported. They are forced to live as undocumented migrants, without the possibility of legally supporting themselves through work or pursuing an education.

The reason they have a better chance of being granted residence permits in France than in Sweden is that the French authorities have taken a different view of so-called internal relocation. Before the Taliban takeover, Sweden considered certain parts of Afghanistan, including the capital Kabul, to be safe. The Swedish Migration Agency’s position was that if you could seek protection elsewhere within your own country, you should do so in the first instance. France made a different assessment, regarding Afghanistan as unsafe as a whole.

In December 2022, the Swedish Migration Agency decided that women from Afghanistan are entitled to refugee status and should be granted three-year residence permits in Sweden. The same does not yet apply to men.

Sweden currently has no formal relations with the Taliban regime, which means that thousands of people cannot be deported to Afghanistan and are instead forced to live undocumented in Sweden. In an interview with Aftonbladet on April 27, 2022, Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard was asked whether Sweden should negotiate with the Taliban to have Afghan citizens returned. Her answer was no. In other words, a deadlock.

On forums and social media groups, I have seen posts almost daily from young men whose asylum applications have been rejected in Sweden, asking how they can get to France without risking arrest along the way. One common route is to take the ferry from Trelleborg to Travemünde in Germany, then travel by train to Cologne, take an unlicensed taxi across the border into France, and continue on to Paris.

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In an industrial area in Achères, about an hour outside Paris, we meet Omid at the refugee accommodation where he is staying. He lived in Sweden for seven years, five of them with a Swedish family outside Uppsala.

Lars-Åke and Åsa met Omid at a language café organised by their church.

“He wasn’t happy where he was living at the time. He was staying with another family first. Someone involved in the language café asked whether we would consider taking him in. We had two grown-up children who had already moved out and one son still living at home, so we thought, we have the space. We had also got to know Omid over the course of the year, so we spoke to our children first to make sure they were on board. We certainly weren’t doing it for the money, but because we wanted to help. Not least because representatives of the government at the time were encouraging all of us to support people and do our part.”

Omid moved in with Lars-Åke, Åsa and their youngest son. He was given his own room and joined the family on holidays and trips.

“We are his mum and dad. That’s what he calls us, and that’s how we feel too. We didn’t want to treat him differently from our other children. He came hiking with us around the Jämtland Triangle, he came with us to the summer house in Värmland — he was simply part of everything.”

“When the second rejection came, he was in the middle of upper secondary school. He already wanted to leave for Paris then. But we managed to persuade him to appeal once more and to push through and finish school. And he did. He graduated.”

After the third rejection in autumn 2022, Omid decided there were no alternatives left. He had to leave for France.

“We were devastated. There were a lot of tears and a lot of grief, but at the same time we felt that we didn’t really have many arguments left to persuade him to stay. He felt as though his life was slipping through his fingers and that he had to move forward. The evening before he left, the whole family had dinner together with him, including the children and grandchildren. My middle son, who is usually a pretty laid-back guy, suddenly broke down in completely uncontrollable tears. It was hard to watch how they reacted. This was a brother being torn away from them.”

Omid set off for France but was stopped by German police in Travemünde and had to spend the night in a cell. When the police released him the following morning, he was told to return to Sweden. Instead, Omid continued his journey to Cologne, where he took an unlicensed taxi to Paris.

His family in Sweden had given him enough money to stay in hotels and hostels at first, so he would not have to sleep on the street. After about a week, Omid heard that the police were carrying out an operation in the La Chapelle area and that everyone sleeping rough there would be taken to a shelter for refugees. He saw it as an opportunity to secure more stable accommodation, packed his belongings and hurried down to the homeless migrants beneath the bridges. The police took him to the shelter, where he is still living while he waits for a decision on his residence permit.

“Since 2015, we have gone from ‘open your hearts’, as one prime minister put it, and the next prime minister saying ‘my Europe does not build walls’, to a situation where we are now supposed to make life as difficult as possible for refugees. I don’t think we handled integration perfectly either, far from it. But we opened our country during a time of crisis and then turned our backs on them. These are people we have invested a great deal in, not least in their education, and then they are not allowed to stay when we actually need them.”

“We have a Messenger group that the whole family is part of, where we share photos and things. At first, we were a little hesitant and asked Omid, ‘Do you really want to be in the group and see us doing all these fun things without you? It doesn’t feel good for us knowing that you have to see that.’ But he said he wanted to, even though it makes him sad that he cannot be there with us.”

Lars-Åke finds it difficult to understand how Sweden has treated the group of unaccompanied young refugees, and compares it to the controversial extradition of Baltic soldiers after the end of the Second World War. At the time, Sweden handed over Baltic soldiers who had fought on the Axis side to Stalin’s Soviet Union, despite knowing that severe punishment and executions awaited them. In 1994, Sweden formally apologised for the extradition, and the 44 surviving Baltic soldiers were invited to meet the King.

“I think that in the future we will look back on this period too and ask ourselves: how could we do this? How could we behave so shamefully? An appalling number of people have been forced to continue their flight. First they came here as refugees, and then they had to flee again, moving on within the EU. And those in power look the other way. In some sense, it is a silent exodus.”