A city project manager in Villepinte has been accused of arranging so-called “white marriages” to help migrants remain in France and is said to have been involved in over a dozen cases.
The 50-year-old female civil servant, who has not been identified, is accused of helping at least a dozen or more migrants gain residency permits through the organisation of “white marriages” over the last two years with reports being forwarded to the prosecutor of Bobigny, Le Parisien reports.
A source close to the investigation claimed the woman had appeared alongside several couples at various cities in the area to help facilitate marriages in which the man involved had no papers to remain in France. The source added that the woman would sometimes shop around to different cities if met with resistance by a local official who questioned the sincerity of the marriage.
A note from the general administration of Villepinte confirms the reports, claiming that the woman “was very insistent several times with the civil status by asking that this ‘couple of friends’ be married very quickly,” during a meeting with civil servants in Sevran last summer.
Some Sevran civil servants also recalled she had married a woman and her daughter several weeks apart, both to migrants without legal residency papers.
Villepinte Mayor Martine Valleton, a member of the conservative Republicans, called the accusations a “conspiracy” saying, “Maybe she accompanies couples to the extent that her mission is to help people from neighbourhoods, some of whom do not speak French… but beyond that, it is false.”
Despite the defence of the woman, who it should be noted helped campaign for Valleton, the mayor announced she would be opening an administrative investigation to settle the issue.
The report comes as German migrant transport NGO Mission Lifeline tweeted that Germans should marry illegal migrants to help keep them in the country.
The tweet was met with severe criticism by many online including Philipp Amthor, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who said, “His absurd call for entering marriages shows clearly that these ‘sea rescue’ [NGOs] in fact pursue a much larger agenda. They want to thwart our immigration law with their left-wing ideology and lead our constitutional state by the nose.”
Last year Swedish journalist and “culture critic” Kristina Lindquist also advocated for people to marry illegals saying, “To give a person a refugee residence permit — is not that a great opportunity to marry someone who can manage and wants it?”
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