After a vicious cyclone this month razed slums housing many undocumented immigrants on the French island territory of Mayotte, Safina Soula did not shed a tear.
As the leader of an advocacy organization representing people from Mayotte, Ms. Soula staunchly supported an operation that the French authorities started last year to destroy the slums and deport undocumented immigrants, most of whom come from the nearby Comoros islands.
She hailed the cyclone as “a divine Wuambushu” — using the name of the slum clearance operation, and added, “Now the state must react quickly and forbid the reconstruction of these shantytowns.”
Cyclone Chido, which struck on Dec. 14 and killed at least 39 people, is inflaming already dangerous tensions over immigration on Mayotte, an archipelago off Africa’s eastern coast. After the disaster, France’s interior ministry said that nearly a third of Mayotte’s 320,000 residents were undocumented immigrants. Locals are calling for the government to ramp up efforts to deport them.
Many Mahorais, as locals are known, have long blamed immigrants for committing crimes and straining resources. Mayotte, where nearly 80 percent of the residents live in poverty, is the poorest place in France.
The people of Mayotte and Comoros share a common ancestry. However, in a decisive referendum in 1974, Mayotte was the only part of the Comoros archipelago that voted to remain part of France.
In recent years, people on Mayotte have attacked the homes of immigrants and stood in front of hospitals and immigration offices to block immigrants from entering. Mahorais have voted in large numbers for far-right, nationalist politicians, who have lobbied for tougher immigration laws specific to Mayotte. Among their demands is ending birthright citizenship for children born to non-French parents on the islands.
After the cyclone hit, France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, gave a television interview saying that France needed to take a more aggressive stance against illegal immigration as part of the reconstruction efforts. He suggested using drones to monitor and stop the boats bringing migrants illegally from Comoros, accusing its government of “pushing populations toward Mayotte to create a kind of illegal occupation.”
On Tuesday, the French government announced that it was restoring boat service between Mayotte and Comoros — and that Comorians could use it to return home, free of charge.
France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, said on Tuesday that he expected the final death toll from the cyclone to remain in the dozens. While surveying the demolished shantytowns, the top French official in Mayotte at first announced that hundreds, if not thousands, had likely perished.
Immigrants in Mayotte have described living a precarious existence long before the cyclone hit. They say they are constantly stopped by the police. Many have been deported multiple times. After each deportation, they take a dangerous 43-mile journey on a rickety boat from Comoros to reunite with their families in Mayotte.
Residents, and even a senior government leader, said they feared that fighting could break out between migrants and Mayotte natives over the island chain’s depleted resources after the cyclone ravaged some communities.
Sylvie Zein, a 37-year-old doctor from mainland France, said that a few days after storm, she was near the mosque in the village where she had been living — Mtsamboro, in the northern part of the country — when residents became alarmed at the sight of about 20 immigrants standing near the beach with machetes. The village director announced over a loudspeaker, “Go to your homes because they are coming,” recalled Ms. Zein.
“You have people with nothing and you have people with everything,” she said. “These people, in the beginning, didn’t like each other. So now the tensions, it’s much worse.”
In the decades since the 1974 referendum, Mayotte and Comoros have taken divergent paths. Despite Mayotte’s poverty, French support has meant it is better off economically than Comoros. Many Mahorais express resentment that Comorians, who rejected France, now seek refuge and economic opportunities in a French territory.
“Comorians chose to be independent, and Mayotte decided to continue its adventure with France,” said Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of Mamoudzou, the capital of Mayotte. “Now each must take responsibility for their choice. We believe that Comorians should stay there.”
In a visit to Mayotte last week, President Emmanuel Macron of France caused an uproar with a profanity-laced defense of his government’s assistance to Mayotte, saying that it was better off than other islands in the Indian Ocean.
“You are happy to be in France, because if it wasn’t France, let me tell you, you’d be 10,000 times” worse off, Mr. Macron told a crowd of locals, using an expletive. “There is no other place in the Indian Ocean where we help people this much.”
Some aid organizations have criticized France’s treatment of migrants on Mayotte, where citizenship and residency rules for foreign nationals are stricter than in the rest of France.
The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, said that French officials routinely placed children on Mayotte in immigration detention with their families, despite condemnation of the practice by the European Court of Human Rights. Of the 3,211 children placed in detention in France in 2021, all but 76 of them were on Mayotte, UNICEF said.
When the government has demolished shantytowns, citizens have been relocated, but undocumented immigrants have not, UNICEF said. And some undocumented children are refused enrollment in schools. .
Still, many Mahorais believe that the government is too accommodating of immigrants and have fought for stricter laws.
Ms. Soula’s group, the Collective of Citizens of Mayotte, has blocked the entrance to the office of the prefect, France’s top official in the territory, since October to prevent immigrants from going there to acquire legal documents. They believed that government officials were granting residency permits to foreigners too freely, she said.
But the migrants say the opposite is true, and that they live in fear, facing police stops so aggressive that they have sometimes led to Mahorais accidentally being deported.
Two days before the cyclone arrived, a 34-year-old woman from Comoros, who is not being identified to protect her identity, was deported to Comoros, leaving behind her five children, all of whom were born on Mayotte. It was the third time she had been deported since she moved to Mayotte in 2009.
She cried day and night, she said, worried that her children would not survive the vicious 120-mile-per-hour winds in the tin shack where they lived on a steep hillside. But the day after the storm passed, her 14-year-old daughter, her eldest child, called her in tears and said they had all survived.
Four days later, the woman said she paid 300 euros, about $312, to cram into a kwassa-kwassa, a wooden boat, for the treacherous 11-hour journey to return to Mayotte illegally. She arrived at 3 a.m. last Friday, happy to be reunited with her children.
“They’re always sending me back to Comoros like it’s a game,” she said. “There’s a day that I will die at sea.”
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