Thread: Expulsion of illegals stepped up by France

France Begins to See The Light!

France has stepped up its anti-Illegal Immigration policies... even though Germany, Spain and Italy had announced mass amnesties.

Here is an article from the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times, that was dated on September 3rd, 2006:

Expulsion of illegals stepped up by France
By Katrin Bennhold
Published: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2006

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/01/ ... php?page=1

PARIS: France has accelerated its deportation of illegal immigrants and is more than halfway toward its 2006 target of 25,000, the Interior Ministry says, but with a new school year approaching the government appears to have largely refrained from expelling families with school-age children.

The issue is highly emotive here, with the government under pressure both from the left and the far right - and from ordinary citizens.

On Wednesday, passengers on an Air France flight to Lagos tried to prevent the plane from taking off when they learned that a Nigerian youth was being deported against his will.

Nonetheless, the expulsions of Africans, Asians and East Europeans are moving forward, reaching 12,716 as of July 31, and accelerating in August, according to Franck Louvrier, spokesman for Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

France expelled 20,000 illegal immigrants in 2005, and Sarkozy vowed to step up the pace after suburban riots last autumn in areas largely inhabited by people of foreign extraction.

"We are on track for our objective of 25,000 expulsions," Louvrier said.

At the same time, following protests by teachers and parents, families with children in school appear to have been spared, advocacy groups say. Only four high school students and two primary school pupils are known to have been among the deportees since early July, according to the Education Without Borders Network, the main organizer of the protests.

The ambiguity is emblematic of the explosive immigration issue eight months before presidential elections.

Sarkozy, a presidential contender who has made immigration his main campaign concern, has struggled to reconcile two opposing trends in public opinion: broad support for stemming illegal immigration and sympathy for children threatened by expulsion.

When parents and teachers hid children from the police in the spring, Sarkozy decreed a freeze in deportations until the end of the school year and offered to legalize 6,000 families without proper residency papers. Nearly 30,000 have applied.

There are 4.9 million immigrants in France, just over 8 percent of the population, according to Insee, the national statistics office. About 200,000 to 400,000 foreigners reside illegally in the country, the government estimates.

One of them is Nenita Beltran, a 33- year-old Filipino mother of two. Her family was among those who applied for the amnesty this summer.

They met Sarkozy's residency criteria. Beltran and her husband arrived more than 10 years ago, their 13-year-old daughter has been in school in France since 2000, and their son was born here four years ago.

But this week, Beltran was among the 24,000 applicants who received letters from the government asking them to leave France. She now fears that the authorities will come after her and her children.

"I'm really afraid," said Beltran. "I had everything they asked for and papers to prove it. I don't understand what else they needed."

According to Richard Moyon of the Education Without Borders Network, the risk of deportation is small for families like Beltran's. His organization has collected over 100,000 signatures of people vowing to protect children from deportation.

"Sarkozy knows this is political dynamite," he said. "I don't think he can afford to go after the tens of thousands of children who are in France illegally."

But if deportations of families with children have declined compared to past summers, the expulsion of single immigrants and childless couples has increased, touching a nerve here.

In the incident Wednesday involving the Nigerian youth, activists and opposition politicians including Jack Lang, a former Socialist education minister and current presidential contender, demonstrated at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport, and two passengers were arrested when a protest erupted on the plane.

The case of Jeff Babatunde, a 19-year- old high school student who arrived in France illegally in 2004, has been closely followed in the press since he was arrested Aug. 1. Babatunde says his mother was a political activist in Nigeria and was shot in a demonstration in 2004, leaving him without family there. The government says there is no evidence for his story.

The media have also focused on 44 African immigrants in Limoges, central France, who are on their fourth week of a hunger strike, threatening to starve themselves to death unless the government gives them residency papers.

Another high-profile case involves 30 mainly West African immigrants awaiting expulsion after Sarkozy mobilized hundreds of riot police to close down France's largest illegal squatter tenement in Cachan, near Paris. Two Malians from among the 547 people chased out of the tenement have already been deported.

While the left has attacked Sarkozy as too tough on illegal immigrants, an embarrassing incident this week exposed him to a fresh outburst from the far right that he is too soft.

The accusation came from Jean-Marie Le Pen, veteran leader of the National Front, after an Algerian immigrant and former prison inmate who was saved from deportation by Sarkozy three years ago stole a car and burst through police barriers outside a building where Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was speaking Wednesday.

The case of Cherif Bouchelaleg, 32, had become symbolic of Sarkozy's decision in 2003 to repeal the longstanding practice of expelling immigrants convicted of a crime after they served their prison terms.

Sarkozy said Bouchelaleg should now be punished severely, but he stood by his repeal of double jeopardy laws.

"It's not about sending him away, because he'd just come back," Sarkozy said. "The issue is the severest possible punishment for repeat offenders."

Mobilization in favor of illegal immigrants has a long history in France, which prides itself as a land of asylum. Last Saturday, hundreds of people demonstrated in Paris to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the storming by police of a church in the Montmartre neighborhood where 300 illegal immigrants had taken refuge. At the time, celebrities like the actress Emmanuelle Béart joined nongovernmental organizations in demanding residency papers for all concerned.

They received the papers, as did 80,000 other illegal immigrants, after a Socialist government came to power in 1997.

But times have changed here, and while Germany, Spain and Italy recently announced mass amnesties for illegal immigrants, Paris has ruled out such a move.

At the same time, following protests by teachers and parents, families with children in school appear to have been spared, advocacy groups say.

This is the mistake the French made, they allowed those children to stay behind for a year because of shcool and they rioted in the streets and caused such a problem.

Don't leave the children behind, send them with the parents!

Dixie

It sounds like we better get a redefinition of the 14th Amendment, like right now.

MarkM,

Who said that Italy had passed a mass amnesty? The last reports we received they were calling out the military to arrest illegals across Italy. What is your source for that comment?

W

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

MarkM,

Who said that Italy had passed a mass amnesty? The last reports we received they were calling out the military to arrest illegals across Italy. What is your source for that comment?

W

William, if you look at the date of the article posted, it is from 2006...not Sept 3rd of this year.

Expulsion of illegals stepped up by France
By Katrin Bennhold
Published: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2006



A quick Google of amnesty in Italy and Spain, shows articles about this dating back to 2006, but nothing recently.

MarkM may just not have noticed the year the article was published?

Mark M has filed a report and asked us to delete the thread. Since there are replies I will lock it.