Visit signals a hardline approach to refugees

"We go England. Top government man will send us – why else he come here?" said Mohammed as he sat on the grass in the sunshine outside the drab green warehouses of the Sangatte refugee centre yesterday, awaiting the arrival of the French Interior Minister.

The heavy security presence at the camp on the edge of Calais should have told Mohammed, a 17-year-old Iraqi Kurd who paid $4,000 (£2,700) to be smuggled to Europe, that in fact the visit of Nicolas Sarkozy was not for his benefit.

But if that didn't send the message, the duration of the visit by France's de facto deputy prime minister certainly did. From start to finish, Mr Sarkozy's fact-finding tour lasted six minutes.

Since it opened three years ago, the cavernous warehouse which is home to 1,300 asylum-seekers drawn from Afghanistan to Turkey has not received a visit from someone of the rank of Mr Sarkozy, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett's French opposite. And by mid-afternoon an ad hoc welcoming committee of refugees and British journalists, drawn by reports of an Anglo-French deal to shut the infamous Red Cross transit camp, had gathered outside the gates to see the man with the power to draw a line under the nightly spectacle of dozens of the dispossessed risking their lives to reach England.

As a military helicopter clattered overhead and gendarmes lined up, this was no cuddly photo opportunity to prove the humanitarian credentials of a country that put the National Front in the run-up for its presidency. Nor was its aim to please Britain's tabloids, eager to unleash a volley of protests about blackmail from Paris.

The truth was that when the ministerial motorcade swept through Sangatte's gates at 5pm it was there largely to persuade French voters in the forthcoming general election that its interim right-wing government was doing something about the "illegals". Despite the optimism of Mohammed and dozens like him as they filed out of the camp to begin their daily duel with security fences, freight trains and inflatable dinghies, others admitted they knew their position was increasingly precarious.

Wakil Latif, a teacher from Kabul looking considerably older than his 42 years, was on his way to the Frethun freight terminal, the current favourite target for asylum-seekers trying to enter Britain. He said: "I know France and England are no better than Afghanistan when it comes to the politicians. They do what will make them richer and more popular. This man wants to shut Sangatte because he thinks he'll be out of a job soon if he doesn't.

"I just have to get to safety before he does. And why if your governments are blowing up my country should you be surprised we come here. Why treat us like caged animals?"

The Red Cross camp is in a former storage depot for equipment used to build the Channel Tunnel. Sat on a windswept plain with discarded plastic bags flapping on the fencing, it holds 700 more people than it should do. Perhaps unsurprisingly, tensions are high, with rivalries between opposing ethnic factions spilling over into pitched battles.

Less than 500 yards from the camp entrance, residents of Sangatte made clear their desire to shut the camp. Claude Devos, 54, the owner of Le Weekend Café in the centre of the village of Sangatte, was one of those who Mr Sarkozy has to convince of a better future after he sold his business for £150,000, a fraction of its value before the camp opened in 1999.

He said: "We have nothing against these people but the situation they find themselves in has ruined me. All the tourism has gone, rightly or wrongly people are afraid to come out of their houses and this village no longer has a purpose.

"We have to cut the link between Sangatte and England once and for all. It's simple, only no one with power seems to have realised that."