Immigrants in France fight for their rights

March 26, 1997
Issue 

By Sam Wainwright

PARIS — "The government has sought and found a balance between individual freedoms and the authority of the state", said minister of the interior Jean-Louis Debré on March 13 after France's Senate passed a package of measures named after him. The Debré Law is a massive attack on the rights of immigrants, and its introduction a month ago sparked a wave of protest. The law goes to the lower house, the Assembly, on March 26 for final ratification.

The rights of non-European Union citizens are being undermined throughout the region, and France's conservative government is leading the charge. In 1993 the previous minister introduced the Pasqua Law, overturning rights that dated back to the 1789 revolution.

This included restricting the ability of people born on French soil of foreign parents to claim citizenship (previously automatic), making permanent residency permits much harder to obtain and expanding the powers of immigration authorities to deport non-citizens.

The Debré Law builds on this base in a draconian and arbitrary way. Article 1 requires anyone lodging a "foreigner" to report the fact to the authorities; failure to do so may result in the "offender" no longer being able to welcome non-citizens into their home. So strong has been the outcry around this provision that the government has softened some of its features.

Other articles are no less outrageous. They include: compulsory fingerprinting of those requesting residency, confiscating the passports of "illegals", increasing police search powers, further restrictions on the granting of residency permits (including in the case of asylum seekers) and reducing avenues of appeal for those denied residency.

Blocking this assault on immigrants is made all the more urgent by the fascist National Front's (FN) victory in the mayoral elections in the southern town of Vitrolles in early February. The FN, which openly declares non-whites to be inferior and seeks to expel all "foreigners", has around 20% support across France and controls four towns.

Opposition was detonated by a petition of 66 prominent French film makers, who published their names in the papers along with a declaration that they would disobey the requirement to report foreigners lodging with them.

In similar style, a collection of personalities with "foreign sounding" surnames went to the press as the "121 difficult names to pronounce" saying they would assemble on February 22 outside Paris police headquarters with suitcases in hand, demanding to know when they were going to be deported.

On the day, they were joined by 100,000 Parisians, and similar demonstrations occurred in other cities. There have been large demonstrations every week since.

An important component of the demonstrations has been the sans-papiers (literally, "without documents"). A year ago a group of sans-papiers formed a collective and occupied a church, refusing to leave until they had been granted residency. Other collectives have followed this example, often going on hunger strike as well.

This going public is extremely courageous, since it exposes them to immediate deportation — as has happened to some.

The struggle of the sans-papiers has galvanised an important section of public opinion against the government's anti-immigrant project — none more so than the Saint Bernard collective in Paris, who were removed only after police broke down the church door with axes and dragged people out by their hair.

However, a majority of French people support increased restrictions on immigration. This reflects the success French capitalism has had in promoting the idea that there is an "immigration problem".

As economic downturn in the early 1980s brought permanent high unemployment and other forms of hardship, the media and establishment political parties launched a propaganda campaign to convince people that immigration was to blame. Of course there is no such link: immigration is falling, yet there has been no reduction in unemployment.

"Respectable" politicians feign horror at the overtly racist program of the FN but have opened the door to its growth.

Firstly, they have exacerbated economic and social insecurity through their policies of privatisation, wage restraint and cuts to social spending. Secondly, the scapegoating of migrants has legitimised racism more generally. In this environment, the FN's influence has grown uninterruptedly since 1984.

With the FN always to their right, the main political parties pose as anti-racist yet have now adopted over half of the FN's original proposals on immigration. Thus rewarded, the FN proposes even more extreme measures.

Opposition Socialist Party (PS) leader Lionel Jospin claims to distinguish between illegal and legal migrants. The distinction is completely false and hypocritical, because the ever tightening government regulations are creating "illegals" out of people who were previously legal.

A wall is going up around Europe as quickly as the borders within it are disappearing, an island of wealth from which the poor masses to the south are excluded.

Previous PS Prime Minister Michel Rocard justified the beginning of the cuts to immigration by claiming that France could not accommodate "all the world's misery". This from the leader of a country whose corporations continue to plunder the wealth of Africa and that has bankrolled the corrupt Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire for more than three decades.

While the imperialist countries promote their demands for access to the markets and resources of the poor countries with hype about "globalisation", the free movement of people is being restricted. The project of governments in the rich countries to close their borders to the world's poor is thoroughly racist, designed to deflect discontent at home onto vulnerable scapegoats and justify the exploitation of the impoverished peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

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