Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
A government assault on illegal immigrant children yields a new French Revolution.
By Daniel Nichanian, Yale University
Monday August 7, 2006
“Vous aussi, parrainez un enfant sans papier” (you too, sponsor an illegal immigrant child) declared left-leaning French daily Libération in stunning call for civil disobedience earlier this summer, as it pleaded with its readers to protect the children of illegal immigrants (including those born in France) from deportation. To lead the way, the paper announced it would sponsor a child every day of that week: “Libération, godfather of Melanie Ortiz, 4-years old” was a headline on June 26. Matsak and Lilit, 11 and 12-years old, were chosen on June 27, and Madalena, Backys and Glory, aged 9, 5, and 3, on June 28.
Libération’s call to action was the climax of 10 months of mobilization in support of the children of immigrants threatened with expulsion by French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Having renewed his commitment to combating illegal immigration in the fall of 2005, Sarkozy—a presidential aspirant who is himself the son of a Hungarian immigrant—had to figure out how to deal with the thousands of families whose children go to French schools, just as the children of any other resident of France. He chose to avoid a confrontation in the middle of the year and announced that no expulsions would take place before the end of the school year, on June 30, 2006. This delay, soon known as the “Sarkozy truce,” allowed enough time for a resistance movement to organize itself against the decrees of the Interior Ministry.
Bernard Jomier, a Green party member of the Paris City Council said to Libération in opposition to the decree, “Few things mobilize public opinion to such an extent. A bachelor threatened with expulsion will get no one emotional. But as soon as children find themselves in the crosshairs, people revolt.” How that could have escaped Sarkozy remains a mystery. It did not escape, however, the Network for Education without Frontiers (RESF), an organization created in 2004 with the explicit purpose of supporting immigrant children. Understanding the benefits of framing the expulsion campaign as a “child hunt,” RESF immediately went into action, launching petitions and calling on ordinary citizens to join the fight to protect the threatened children.
 The matter was not presented as a traditional immigrant rights issue, but as an attack on communities. In other words, it is not just the lives of the deported children that would be affected, but those of every single person in their neighborhoods, schools, and houses of worship. Reports in prominent newspapers such as Le Monde and Libération soon testified to the success of RESF’s campaign in mobilizing far beyond the usual leftist activists. Libération reported in its May 19 issue that many parents involved in the resistance network explained that they did not feel concerned until their own children started worrying about the fate of some of their friends.
Helped by celebrities (soccer player Lilian Thuram has been particularly outspoken on the issue, denouncing the “Sarkozyization of minds” on July 18) and left-leaning political parties, the RESF got thousands of people to agree to hide children and otherwise resist expulsions after the deadline of June 30. Such actions are clearly illegal, but many ordinary citizens publicly declared themselves ready to face the risks to assist people they have known for years. The petition, already signed by around 120,000 people, is a full-throated pledge of support: “ We will not allow these infamies to be done in our name. Every one of us is ready to help, guide and protect in whatever way is possible. When they seek refuge, we will not close our doors but will give shelter and food; we will not denounce them to the police.” To strengthen the commitment of its supporters, RESF asked them to sponsor individual children and look after their well-being. Municipalities all around the country, usually headed by left-wing mayors, organized sponsorship ceremonies in city halls throughout the spring.
While it is doubtful that RESF’s civil disobedience network can resist the police if Sarkozy is determined to carry out the expulsions, this protest has already demonstrated its effectiveness as a public relations stunt. In a highly reported case in April, two young siblings facing deportation were kept hidden by different families in Lyon. Indeed, according to French law, hiding children is enough to protect a family: the police are not allowed to deport a mother without her children. A few other examples of hidden children have been enough to demonstrate RESF’s strength and their ability to generate favorable media coverage.
Sarkozy has had to react carefully to this campaign. He knew he could not prevail without appearing conciliatory. But he also realized that he could not give in to the demands of RESF without alienating his electoral base and attracting the wrath of the far-right. The last two months revealed how shrewd a politician Sarkozy is.
On June 13, Sarkozy announced that, under three strict conditions, some families could be regularized: Their children must have been born in France, gone to school only in France, and must not know the language of his family’s country of origin. Most media outlets, such as televised news, reported this as an act of clemency, while immigrant organizations soon protested, arguing that only 2 to 5 percent of the threatened families meet the criteria. But Sarkozy’s announcement had another crucial consequence: it postponed the day of the start of expulsions. Indeed, thousands of families in precarious positions rushed to the nearest government office and submitted demands to be regularized. Sarkozy announced that no expulsions would take place before all of the demands were assessed, sometime in the month of August. When June 30 came around, RESF did warn “the children hunt” would now start, but the sense of urgency had stalled.
Throughout the month of July, French administration officials slowly but significantly changed their tune. Sarkozy, who pledged there would be no regularizations earlier in the year, soon declared that about a thousand families met the criteria. When a prefect estimated that “a couple of thousand” families would be affected, Sarkozy replied, “Those who know nothing of the situation should abstain from intervening.” But the three restrictive conditions under which an illegal immigrant could be regularized, outlined by Sarkozy on June 13, had discreetly been modified into slightly less restrictive conditions, that more families would presumably be able to meet. On July 24, Sarkozy announced that 7,000 people, 30 percent of those who had submitted applications at their prefecture, would be regularized. In response the far right demanded that all illegal immigrants be immediately deported. The left was similarly enraged (in their opinion the number was too low), and Socialist politician Jack Lang declared that there are at least 20,000 students who deserve to be regularized. In other words, Sarkozy, by courting opposition on both sides, seems to be on his way to portraying his solution as the centrist path between two extremes, thus reducing the public outrage that fed the RESF movement.
The way different newspapers reacted to Sarkozy’s most recent declaration speaks to the changing tone of the immigration dialogue in the past few weeks. Libération was characteristically harsh, emphasizing the number of children Sarkozy still plans to deport. “Sarkozy rejects two of every three children,” was its headline of July 25, with Sarkozy being criticized for cultivating an “image of severity instead of real humanity.” The same day, Le Figaro, the leading right-leaning daily, chose to profile “Marisa and Rafael,” a couple with two children that chose to accept the 11,000 euros the French government offered to pay if they did not ask to be regularized and left France voluntarily (only five families in all of France had taken advantage of this offer at the time the article appeared).
The police have already started organizing some expulsions, and the deadline for the thousands of remaining families is fast approaching. The situation is even more puzzling when one considers how isolated France appears on the immigration issue among its European neighbors. Spain announced a massive number of regularizations last year, and the newly elected center-left Italian Premier Romano Prodi is planning to legalize 500,000 illegal immigrants. Even the conservative German government of Angela Merkel is taking the same path for more than a 100,000 immigrants. So why is Sarkozy so dead set against a real act of clemency? Could it have something to do with the fact that presidential elections are less than a year away?
Over the past five years, Sarkozy has prepared himself to be the next French president. The presidential campaign of 2002 focused mainly on issues of public safety and social order, which led to the stunning scenario in which Socialist Lionel Jospin received fewer votes in the first round than far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. As Minister of the Interior for three of the past five years under President Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy depicted himself as the “first cop of France,” and has become the candidate of public order. Immigration is an obvious component of Sarkozy’s strategy. With many already reproaching him for openly flirting with the nationalist electorate of the far-right National Front party, Sarkozy recently borrowed some of National Front leader Le Pen’s old slogans—“La France, tu l’aimes ou tu la quittes” (France, you love it or you leave it)—and drafted a controversial immigration plan, strongly condemned in African countries, especially by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal who accused France of trying to steal away the elites of developing countries while making it drastically more difficult for less educated immigrants to receive immigration documents.
Appearing too strict and embarking in a stubborn battle against the RESF would cast Sarkozy in the role of an inhumane “child hunter.” But Sarzkozy cannot follow Germany, Italy and Spain’s lead on clemency without alienating his own base and becoming the whipping boy of the far-right, whose voters support is essential to his electoral strategy. The danger for Sarkozy, of course, is that his precarious position becomes too obvious. In addition to Libération’s predictable criticism that Sarkozy is sacrificing immigrant children to electoral concerns, many regional newspapers are sounding the same theme.
Sarkozy has wavered plenty over the past two months; whether it will be enough to deflect public outrage still remains to be seen. Ultimately, the fate of thousands of immigrants is at stake and many will soon be deported. But if RESF still has the force to mount an active resistance movement, it could leave the French political scene in chaos a year before the presidential election, and rewrite the way grassroots issue campaigns are conducted in France—and perhaps elsewhere too.
Illustration: Matt Bors
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Comments
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The larger question, of course, is how France should go about assimilating its immigrant populations – they’ve utterly failed at that so far. There are dozens of areas in France where police fear to tread because they come under automatic weapons and RPG fire.
It also highlights the unsustainability of France’s welfare state; it’s a regime maintained on the backs of a second-class populace, and if France truly took an Americanized approach to assimilation of immigrants, it’d likely break the back of their social systems.
The current French state is inherently unsustainable; how they rectify that remains to be seen. With so many interest groups in France on all sides ready to cry outrage and take to the streets at a moment’s notice, it’s a formidable political minefield to navigate.
— Joe - Aug 7, 07:30 PM - #First, this is one of the deepest analyses I’ve seen of the French immigration debate in the American press.
Joe:”if France truly took an Americanized approach to assimilation of immigrants…” Would that be the Lou Dobbs approach? The Minuteman approach? Or the do-nothing approach favored by big business and thus our politicians?
Whatever the case, the comparison to America is hardly a contrast between a sustainable welfare state and successful “assimilating” of immigrants here in America as opposed to the failures of France. Our ever-shrinking welfare state, left divided between concern for a native (and sometimes nativist) working class and a rapidly increasing immigrant class, and right undergoing a process I’d characterize as “Sarkozyization”, suggest a very different picture. I don’t know the French situation well enough to know what lessons we can draw in this regard (perhaps Daniel could offer some suggestions), but I think we should try to learn from France’s failings not because they contrast, but because they form a distorted mirror of America’s.
But what? The only hopeful lesson I see is that a focus on children, rather than the employed, can help broaden a coalition to support immigrant rights. If we take home instead the “unsustainability” (a great adjective to undermine any vision for progress, especially on immigration and rebuilding the rapidly crumbling “welfare state”) of all things French, then I’m afraid we haven’t learned much at all.
— Stan - Aug 8, 05:37 PM - #“Joe:”if France truly took an Americanized approach to assimilation of immigrants…” Would that be the Lou Dobbs approach? The Minuteman approach? Or the do-nothing approach favored by big business and thus our politicians?”
You’re not actually reading what I write. The key phrase is assimilation of immigrants; perhaps you’ve never understood this, but America’s approach to immigration – offering full equality but asking them to buy into our values, history, and language – is a very unique one.
The least-assimilated immigrant communities in America have something like a 25% rate of being unable to speak English. In many immigrant communities throughout Western European nations, 75% can’t speak the mother tongue. The knowledge we ask our immigrants to have about our values systems, history, and structures of governance is almost unheard of there.
You’re focusing on how they get here; that’s hardly relevant. The point is what we do with them once they’re here, and our approach is far superior to France’s.
“but I think we should try to learn from France’s failings not because they contrast, but because they form a distorted mirror of America’s.”
Unlike France, we do not have a failing and unsustainable immigration policy, and our social welfare nets could use a tune-up, but they’ve largely been on the right track since Clinton passed sweeping welfare reform. America is a country in need of incremental progress, but not drastic change.
France, on the other hand, is halfway down the road to being a failed state.
“If we take home instead the “unsustainability” (a great adjective to undermine any vision for progress,”
Anyone who doesn’t let sustainability get in the way of their ‘vision’ is a outright moron.
France is not a progressive state; it is a regressive dinosaur. America, for all its faults, really is one of the most progressive nations currently in existence.
What we’ve learned is that our own system really is working comparatively well, and that radicalism just leaves a nation worse off in the long run.
— Joe - Aug 9, 04:37 PM - #Joe, which America are you referring to?
“We do not have a failing and unsustainable immigration policy, and our social welfare nets could use a tune-up, but they’ve largely been on the right track since Clinton passed sweeping welfare reform.”
Our country’s immigration system is as broken as could be, with so many immigrants living either illegaly, or in dramatically appalling living conditions.
And I’m not sure where to begin on our welfare state, since America notirously lacks any actual welfare system comparativly to any other developed nation. I’m not sure how you even can say America does not need drastic change if you know the health care statistic and reality in this country. (not to even mention that Clinton dismantled some of the few good elements of American welfare that still remained after the Reagan revolution).
I understand, Joe, that the traditional coverage of France in the US is negative (strikes, strikes, strikes and riots). But beyond these conventional images, why do you say that the French, or more generally the Socio-Democratic model, is broken?
Even if you think France is regressive and dying, do you think the same of states that have even stronger welfare systems, such as the Scandanavian countries? Do you really mean that America is more progressive than Sweden for example, or other European countries?
— George - Aug 9, 05:03 PM - #“Our country’s immigration system is as broken as could be, with so many immigrants living either illegaly, or in dramatically appalling living conditions.”
That could use improvement, but it’s not ‘broken’ by any means. It does not threaten the fabric of our society or the established social order.
“And I’m not sure where to begin on our welfare state, since America notirously lacks any actual welfare system comparativly to any other developed nation.”
Considering my family benefits from the welfare state in a variety of ways, your claim that we ‘really don’t have one’ falls upon deaf ears. Ours is certainly less extensive than most Western European nations; but in a sense, that works to our advantage since ours is one of the only really sustainable welfare states currently in existence.
”
I understand, Joe, that the traditional coverage of France in the US is negative (strikes, strikes, strikes and riots). But beyond these conventional images, why do you say that the French, or more generally the Socio-Democratic model, is broken?”
In a global competitive marketplace, France is increasingly unable to compete. They’re consistently giving up on many of the major principles of liberal governance, and they’ve failed to integrate newcomers into their society who they originally brought in to make up for their anemic birthrates. Their economy is stagnant in large part because their entrepeneurial life is stagnant. They only hang on to what they have with the help of illiberal and unjust tariffs and controls on the economy.
France, as a state, has utterly failed to unify its citizens around a compelling and successful singular vision of the French nation which can satisfy its members at home, defend itself abroad, and compete in the global marketplace.
— Joe - Aug 10, 03:42 PM - #The struggle for human rights in France and Europe dates to the policy reversals of the mid 1970’s. With the addition of cyberspace as a crucial instrument for discussion and action, the battle is expanding.
Recently, Sarkozy – known to his critics as Giussolini (Rudi from NYC and Benito from Rome) focused on attacking the judges in Bobigny. Jean-Pierre Rosenzweig as well as the Syndicat de la Magistrature (representing almost thirty percent of the judiciary) in conjunction with RESF – have provided an important and positive alternative to the Sarkozy design for repression and oppression.
In November, European Judges for Democracy and Freedom (with a membership that is only European in the sense of being “civil law” and includes powerful voices from the judiciary in the Americas) will gather to formulate a strategy for action at the national and international levels.
The notion that one can find a “French” pathway to solving the immigration problem without a “European” and “International” strategy owes much to the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his pamphlets on “Firing Back at the Tyranny of the Marketplace.”
The Schengen Accords run up against the Helsinki Accords!
The details on French demography and projections for the future do not correspond with the rest of Europe.
If current trends persist, there will be more French folks than Germans by mid-century.
There is reason to hope!
— David - Aug 11, 07:06 AM - #Immigration will break the backs and the banks of America too. Won’t it be sad when people look back in hindsight and realize that ‘hateful’ people like me are right to be against an invasion of interlopers who are gaining the rights of REAL AMERICAN citizens who went to sleep and forgot what DEMOCRACY MEANT. Home, hearth, and Family and there is no GOD if he isn’t looking out for his own.
— Zena - Aug 15, 09:06 PM - #I’m a french student and I wish to tell you what I see about assimilation in my country.
I think that since the begin of immigration from Maghreb, any real effort of assimilation was wished by autorities. But until the 80’s and the increase of unemployment, that was not a problem. Since about twenty years, immigration make French think that immigrants were stealing there jobs, so autorities started to close the frontiers. Today, this situation has brought the come back of extreme right and the Sarkozysm. On the left, ideas about immigration and assimilation are recent.
But Sarkozy have only solutions against immigraton; he doesn’t want really assimilate the new immigrants. So, they are separate from the rest of the french population, without any possibility of assimilation.
Joe:”There are dozens of areas in France where police fear to tread because they come under automatic weapons and RPG fire.”
In my opinion that was right on the 80’s and the begin of 90’s, but today police doesn’t fear to tread into these places:Sarkozy give them more repression power. In October 2005, the revolt in the suburbs started after the dead of two guys chased by the police.
Assimilation appears to me like the main problem of immigration. Sarkozy never can prevent Africans to come illegaly in France. I think we must assimilate them and find a solution at the end of the crise with them.
— Melaine, a french student - Aug 18, 10:14 AM - #In my opinion France is not a “regressive dinosaur”, it’s a country in a periode of weak increase, but where a minority has always all the priviledges.