Six migrant men from the Ivory Coast have all claimed to be the father of one child in the northern French department of Manche in order that they would each be able to claim residency in France.
The court of Coutances in Manche discovered that at least six men had claimed to be the father of the child, who was born in 2012 to a French mother who had become pregnant after leaving home at the age of eighteen to be with a man from the Ivory Coast.
The man who caused the young woman to be pregnant acknowledged he was the father of the child and was able to claim a residency permit by doing so. Other members of the Ivory Coast community decided to copy his actions, with the help of the mother of the child by registering to be the child’s father in different town halls in the region, Actu reports.
Another individual from the Ivory Coast living in the commune of Saint-Lô was also said to be aiding the men along with the young mother, who did not believe what she was doing was actually illegal. The court sentenced the organizer of the scam to six months in prison, while the others involved received suspended sentences of fines.
Similar scams to aid migrants in obtaining French residency permits have been seen in the last few years in parts of the country.
In 2019, a city project manager in Villepinte was accused of helping migrants gain residency from so-called “white marriages,” sham unions between migrants and French nationals. The 50-year-old civil servant was said to have been being involved in as many as a dozen white marriages over the period of two years.
Other schemes to gain residency or simply avoid deportation have involved migrants forging documents to claim to be underage as minor migrants are rarely deported and often get preferential treatment to adults.
In 2018, a network of migrants from the Ivory Coast was caught by police in Montpellier forging documents and are said to have directly worked with people traffickers operating in Libya.