“SIX places left for Rouen!” calls the official in a red jacket, approaching the queue of refugees hoping to board coaches. “Where’s that?” asks Dilo, a 24-year-old Afghan, his belongings stuffed into a small zip-up bag. The official pulls out a plastified map of French regions, and points to Normandy. “Near Paris? OK,” Dilo agrees. His name is recorded, a green wristband fitted, and he is shepherded with other volunteers through the hangar which serves as a processing centre, and on to the waiting coach outside. As it pulls away, the advertising slogan on this tourist bus comes into view: “Follow your dreams”.

For the 8,000 or so refugees, most of them from Sudan, Afghanistan and Eritrea, who had made the camp in the Calais dunes their home, there are few dreams left. Many had hoped to reach Britain, across the English Channel. But the construction of ever-higher walls topped with razor wire around the undersea tunnel and now the port (financed by the British government), along with heavy French policing, has sealed the route. “I’ve tried so many times, but it’s impossible,” says Jan, a 29-year-old Afghan, clutching a cricket bat. He is now heading for Normandy too.

The French effort to clear and close the camp, announced a month ago by President François Hollande, was always going to be delicate. There is deep French frustration that the British government was not prepared to be more welcoming to refugees, whatever its legal rights to deny entry. Britain has taken in some 200 unaccompanied children, out of the 1,400 or so found to be living in “the Jungle”, as the Calais camp is known. As a general rule, Britain will not take adults, who under EU rules are supposed to apply for asylum in their country of arrival. This week British officials were in the camp to assess which children qualified.

Yet, despite moments of tension, the initial clearance was orderly. After three days, 5,596 migrants had left in coaches bound for reception centres across France. Over 1,200 children were in a provisional reception centre in Calais, though aid workers said up to 200 others were still without shelter. Many of those queuing for coaches seemed accepting, even eager. “I’ve decided to stay,” says Hassan, wearing an NY baseball cap, who made it to Calais from Sudan via Libya and Italy, and had hoped to reach Britain. What does he feel about settling in France? “Merci beaucoup.”

As the tents emptied this week, small diggers moved in. Refuse workers pulled apart the wood-framed shacks, loading piles of blankets, flip-flops and charred frying pans on to a dump. Bulldozers were kept at bay until migrants had left. Riot police encircled the areas being cleared. Fires broke out, flattening whole sections of the camp, including the “high street”, where an “Afghan kitchen” offered chicken and falafel. Things could yet get tense once the voluntary departures come to an end.

Calais has long taken on a broader meaning. The shocking sight of a muddy, foul-smelling camp in the heart of rich Europe has come to symbolise the continent’s ambivalence to the refugee crisis. In theory, the EU was supposed to share responsibility for the asylum-seekers who arrived en masse from Syria, via Greece, last year. In practice, Germany has been by far the most generous, with 477,000 people applying for asylum in 2015 alone—over five times the number of refugees who applied for asylum last year in France, and next to just 39,000 in Britain.

Playing politics with people

France, in reality, has found itself to be a country of transit rather than a destination, and as such a reluctant gatekeeper for the British. Around Calais, exasperation about the camp has stirred support for the far-right National Front. It has also been exploited for broader political ends ahead of France’s presidential election next spring. Both Alain Juppé, the leading aspirant on the centre-right, and Nicolas Sarkozy, a former president hoping to run again, have threatened to tear up the Le Touquet agreement which gives Britain the right to conduct border checks at Calais. “We cannot accept making the selection on French territory of people that Britain does or doesn’t want,” Mr Juppé has declared.

Even if the camp is cleared without mishap, bilateral tensions will remain. Some refugees will indeed make a life in France. According to Pascal Brice, head of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and the Stateless (OFPRA), 70% of those who applied recently from Calais were given asylum. Last year, OFPRA chartered coaches to bring Syrian refugees from Germany. Migrants housed in towns such as Cergy-Pontoise, near Paris, have learned French and begun to settle. Yet others will disappear, heading for Paris, or back to the northern coast. In 2002, a refugee camp in Calais, at Sangatte, was closed by Mr Sarkozy, then interior minister, only for the Jungle to emerge. Today, camps near Calais—in Dunkirk, or Saint-Omer—have already sprung up along the coast.

Back in the Jungle, the mood is one of resignation. Silent and alone on the top of a dune, Ibrahim watches the demolition below. Behind him is his own condemned shack, a structure of wood and tarpaulin, on which he has painted “London Hotel”. With the diggers closing in, he has given up hope of reaching United Kingdom’s capital, and cleared out his home. He carries its contents in a small back-pack. Sudan, his former home, is a long way away. What does he feel? “Nothing.”