The government of French President Emmanuel Macron has offered public officials in Paris’s no-go suburbs a €10,000 bonus if they stay in the troubled area for at least five years.
Public officials in Seine-Saint-Denis will be given the £9,000/$11,000 cash bonus as a part of a plan by the government to improve the suburbs, which have been long plagued by poverty, high crime, and high unemployment rates.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe listed several other measures to the French parliament including 100 more police officers. Fifty will be members of the judicial police, which Prime Minister Philippe said had seen a “very large drop out” of personnel, Le Parisien reports.
“Enabling pre-recruitment and the mobilisation of talent for education” is another objective for the government’s plan for the area, Philippe added. He said at least 200 trainee teachers would be contracted.
“We know that it is slow, regular, coherent, lasting, and massive work that will produce the effects that we expect,” he added.
Seine-Saint-Denis, also known by its departmental number 93, has one of the highest populations of illegal migrants in France, with some estimating hundreds of thousands of illegals live in the area.
A report from earlier this year revealed that the suburbs are now the second most populated department within the Île-de-France (Paris) region, behind only the city of Paris itself.
“The population is growing twice as fast as the regional average, thanks to a young population, economic development, and major housing construction programmes,” the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) said.
Crime has also been a major problem in the suburbs, from random acts of violence like a case in 2018 that saw a man robbed of his gold teeth on the streets of Aubervilliers, to gangland shootings such as one incident in the same year in Saint-Denis that left a man dead in his bullet-riddled car.