France hosts immigration meeting amid Roma deportations

France hosted an 'immigration' summit today, inviting the interior ministers from Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK , Greece, and Canada.

The French are looking for support for its policy of deporting Roma, or gypsies, back to their home countries of Romania and Bulgaria, who were not invited to the summit.

The Programmes Director for the European Roma Rights Centre, Tara Bedard, told Vatican Radio the meeting cannot accomplish much.

“If you want to deal effectively with immigration, then you should be talking with the countries of origin as much as you are talking with other countries which receive the migrants.”

The French deportations saw 1000 Roma returned to Romania and Bulgaria last month while 11,000 were expelled from France last year.

Bedard says today’s meeting has only one real agenda.

She says they are only trying “to look at ways to curb migration into their countries.”