French president announces measures alongside promise to crack down on economic immigrants.
France will welcome 10,000 refugees over the next 12 months, including sending out teams to Tchad and Niger to identify and transport people deserving asylum status.
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The missions will also seek to deter economic migrants from those countries.
President Emmanuel Macron says France will host 3,000 refugees from the two African countries, compared with 94,000 that the UNHCR estimates are in need of a place of safety. Other places will go to people from Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.
The president also announced that France will intensify efforts to repatriate so-called economic immigrants not awarded refugee status.
“I want to welcome better those who are eligible to seek asylum; to speed up administrative timeframes which are inhumane and inefficient; to offer programmes of integration in terms of language, accommodation, work. And also to be much more rigorous in sending back to the borders those who don’t have the rights to this status,” he said