PARIS, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) -- French police cleared out two illegal migrant camps in northern Paris early Thursday morning, a day after President Emmanuel Macron's government unveiled tough measures to handle the migrant influx.
Citing severely degraded health situation and increasing insecurity in the capital's Peripherique ring road, Paris police said they evacuated between 400 and 500 migrants from an illegal roadside site in the Porte de la Chapelle area and nearly 900 others on President Wilson avenue.
The migrants, most of them from Africa and the Middle East, have been transferred to reception centers in Ile-de France region.
On Wednesday, French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner pledged to clear out all the migrant camps in northeastern Paris by year-end.
"We can no longer accept dangerous accommodation conditions in some camps. We will continue to evacuate these sites," Castaner said.
Clearing unofficial migrant camps is a part of the government's new plan on immigration unveiled on Wednesday "to take back control of migration policy."
To better curb immigrants flows, the French government has taken tougher regulations, which include quotas for immigrant workers and restricted access to non-urgent healthcare for newly-arrived asylum seekers, two measures supported by the right-wing parties.
Thousands of migrants from Africa and the Middle East have fled war and poverty in their native countries, leading to an unprecedented migrant crisis in Europe in 2015.
In France, they ended up in the northern port of Calais where the French end of the Channel Tunnel is located. They had attempted to board lorries and trains heading to Britain to seek better lives.
Since the evacuation in late 2016 of "the Jungle," a major migrant camp in Calais, more migrants have moved to Paris where they lived in tents and dire conditions near the capital's ring road.
