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MAYOTTE
It's a part of Europe, but it’s also in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The island of Mayotte, a French overseas department of about 370 square kilometres in the Mozambique Strait, has become the destination of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers looking to reach European Union territory through alternative migration routes than the Mediterranean.
Nearly half of its almost 260,000 inhabitants are foreigners, and it is estimated that 50% of them are also in an irregular situation. Located 8,000 kilometres away from Paris, they expel more migrants from here than from the whole of continental France: an average of between 18,000 and 22,000 people a year. Most of them come from the neighbouring and impoverished Comoros, which became independent from France in 1975.
Geographically located in the same archipelago, Mayotte voted in a referendum to continue depending on the metropolis, thus maintaining its links with Paris, which in 2011 granted it the status of a French overseas department. In 2014, this small territory in the Indian Ocean became part of the EU as an Outermost Region.
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