Emmanuel Macron flies Monday night for Mayotte, where it will be largely question of fight against illegal immigration, which suffers this island. Mayotte, off the south-east of Africa, is indeed the first destination of Comorian migrants but not only, some newcomers have come from now on much further.
Out of 256,000 inhabitants in Mayotte, only half were born there. The rest of the population comes mainly from Comoros. This is the case of Mansour, 32, arrived in kwassa-kwassa. They were about twenty like him on the boat. "It was a disaster, there were waves coming back inside the boat, we were cold, it was not easy," he says. This man has paid 2,000 euros to a smuggler to come. But other nationalities are now taking the same risks for several years: they come from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, transit through the Comoros and arrive in Mayotte.
New migration routes to access European territories
Romain Reille, head of associations, handles dozens of asylum applications every week. "Algerians, Moroccans, Sudanese, Syrians, Burundians ... These people transit through the Mediterranean to access the gates of Europe," he says. "But these sea routes are increasingly difficult to access, so there is a reversal of migratory flows to the territory of Mayotte."
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So many trips that sometimes turn to drama. In 30 years, there are an estimated 12,000 missing people off Mayotte. To discourage candidates, the law of the soil was restricted on the spot. A child born to a migrant on Mahoran soil no longer automatically obtains French nationality.