The Gaîté Lyrique theater has been a jewel in Paris’s glittering cultural scene since the 19th century. It once hosted the operettas of Jacques Offenbach and performances by the Ballets Russes.
This season, though, its most talked-about drama has been generated by more than 300 homeless immigrants who are camping in the venue, sleeping on its floors at night and demanding that the French government provide them with real housing and other benefits because, they say, they are under 18. This is a crucial bureaucratic hurdle in France: If they are legally recognized as unaccompanied minors, they become eligible for housing and other government aid.
The Belleville Park Youth Collective, a Parisian group that includes immigrants and nonimmigrant left-wing activists, is organizing the occupation. Since 2023, they have staged similar occupations in other, lesser-known venues. Organizers say their actions have pressured city officials into finding 800 shelter spots for youths.
But the city government says it has no shelter space left. And it has made a preliminary determination that many of the migrants are not the age they say they are. That has left many of them in limbo while they pursue their appeals in court.
As signatories of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, European countries must give special protections, including housing, to immigrant minors. And the question of lying about — or being unable to prove — a birthday has become a flashpoint as anti-immigrant sentiment helps fuel the rise of far-right parties across the continent.
“This is a huge issue in Europe,” said Ulrike Bialas, a sociologist who has studied young immigrants in Germany, and is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.
In Britain in November, Rupert Lowe, a member of Parliament and of Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform U.K. party, called upon the British government to reassess the ages of “illegal migrants who claim to be 16/17.” In Germany, lawmakers for the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the state of Baden-Württemberg illustrated their concern online with a photograph of a bearded man dressed as an infant.
It is not only far-right figures who believe that the rules are being abused. Last year, Senator Valérie Boyer, a member of the Republicans, a French political party that is conservative but not far right, said that young immigrants given benefits by the government were “too often false minors, who are in reality economic migrants.”
In the past decade, Dr. Bialas, the sociologist, said, “vast numbers” of unaccompanied young migrants, have come to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. “Many of them — in fact, in Germany, more than half of them — don’t have documents with them to prove their identity, and in particular, their date of birth,” she said.
In France, experts say, unaccompanied young immigrants who cannot prove they are minors often end up on the street.
Mohamed Bah, who is one of the many immigrants occupying the Gaîté Lyrique, is in exactly that predicament. In a recent interview, he said he was sleeping under a bridge before he joined others in occupying the theater. So far, he said, he has been unable to convince French authorities that he is 15. “They asked me for documents,” he said. “I told them I only had pictures.”
Looking at the young man, who traveled to France from Senegal in October, it was practically impossible to say for certain how old he might be.
Like many, his preliminary application for benefits was denied, and he is waiting for the courts to resolve his appeal — a process that might take months.
The preliminary assessment in Paris is conducted by a nonprofit group, France Land of Asylum, that extensively interviews the applicants, said Vincent Beaugrand, the group’s director. Mr. Beaugrand said the process was not an exact science. Often migrants do not carry official documents or say they do not have a record of their age. City officials say that at this stage, the immigrants fail to earn official recognition as minors about 70 percent of the time.
In France, immigrants like Mohamed have been referred to as “ni-nis,” because they are “ni mineurs, ni majeurs”— neither minor nor adult. According to the French Justice Ministry, 5,990 unaccompanied immigrants were verified as minors in 2014. That number rose to 19,370 in 2023.
Provisional data for last year suggests that the number has dipped significantly, possibly because the European Union has recently begun paying North African countries to prevent sub-Saharan Africans from making their way to Europe.
Still, a survey last year by a group of French homeless advocacy groups found that at least 3,477 young immigrants were without permanent homes and waiting for the authorities to render an official determination of their age. More than 1,000 of them were living in the street, the group said.
This month, Marine Hamelet, a lawmaker with France’s nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally party, posted a video online saying that methods to “unmask the cheaters” on age needed beefing up.
“The protection of children is an essential duty of humanity,” she said. “But the policy of welcoming unaccompanied minors must not be misused to the point of becoming an immigration channel.”
Ms. Hamelet, who did not respond to interview requests, said in the video that each unaccompanied minor taken under the government’s wing costs French taxpayers about 50,000 euros, roughly $52,000, per year, a figure that has been disputed.
Others argue that France should treat all young immigrants as though they were minors, and give them the corresponding benefits while they wait for their appeals to go through — especially given how likely they are to succeed. UNICEF says 50 percent to 80 percent of immigrant youth who take their appeals to a judge in France are eventually deemed to be minors.
Corentin Bailleul, head of the advocacy and programs division for UNICEF in France, said leaving children in limbo while they appeal their cases was out of step with the principles of the U.N. convention on children. “We are calling on France to review its legislation to make it conform with, essentially, the presumption of minority status,” he said.
The occupation of the Gaîté Lyrique, which began on Dec. 10, has forced the cancellation or relocation of the programming at the theater, a handsome Italianate building about a mile from the Louvre that has been a city-run cultural center since 2002. For weeks, its halls have been packed with the immigrants, mostly from France’s former African colonies, including Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal. In the mornings, they line up for donated breakfast. In the daytime, they scroll on their phones surrounded by their blankets and meager belongings. In the evenings, they attend organizing meetings.
A hand-lettered banner stretched across the facade says, “No unaccompanied minors in the street!” Google Maps declares the venue temporarily closed.
“As long as there is no shelter for the minors,” Mr. Bah said, “the place will be occupied.”
City Hall and the national government are squabbling over who is responsible for the migrants. The city government owns the theater, with programming in recent years that includes workshops, indie rock shows, art installations and other events that often reflect the left-leaning politics of Paris.
Léa Filoche, a Paris deputy mayor who deals with emergency housing issues, said in an interview that the city had no more shelter to offer. The center-right national government, she said, should be finding lodging for the immigrants.
Officials at the Paris area prefecture, an arm of the national government, declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, they said the occupation was being staged “by migrants recognized as adults by the social services of the City of Paris.”
The immigrants have found the theater management to be allies, not opponents. It is a position that has led one conservative radio commentator to accuse the management of suffering from “Stockholm syndrome.”
In an interview, Juliette Donadieu, the general manager, said she was worried that the venue could founder financially if a solution does not come soon. But Ms. Donadieu said the matter was one of basic human decency.
“Who could, today, in the middle of winter, put these people out on the street?” she said.
