Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Migration & Refugees, Population

RIGHTS-FRANCE: Policy Ignores Deeper Questions of Migration

A. D. McKenzie

PARIS, Feb 24 2010 (IPS) - European Union immigration ministers will hold a special meeting Thursday to adopt a new policy to protect the region’s external borders against undocumented migration, French immigration minister Eric Besson has announced.

France is proposing 29 measures for consideration, which the government hopes will stem the flow of undocumented migrants coming via the Mediterranean. But as the ministers get ready to meet, activists continue to protest against the French government’s handling of such migrants, calling for more humane laws and treatment.

Earlier this month, French police expelled migrants from a hangar in the port city of Calais where they had been sheltered by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and Besson declared that there would be no new ‘jungle’ on French soil.

“Conflicts taking place in the Middle East force these people – the real ‘collateral damage’ – to come to our country,” the French group SoS Sans Papiers said in a statement. “It’s not by violence and the expulsion from the hangar or by razing their camp that Besson poses the real questions, but he should respond to them.”

The hangar had been rented by SoS Sans Papiers and the transnational network No Borders to provide a ‘safe space’ for migrants, mainly Aghan and Iraqi refugees, and their supporters to meet, the groups said.

“There should be no reason why European countries are so fearful of migrants,” Dan Rosenthal, a spokesman for London No Borders, told IPS on telephone. He said the organisation was calling for freedom of movement and more open discussion on migration.

“One of the problems is that governments have criminalised migration. They have created a connection between being a migrant and being a criminal,’’ Rosenthal said. ‘’People should be able to go where they want to, and the money currently being spent on tightening borders, preventing immigration and detaining people could be used more wisely.”

According to activists, the real issue that should be addressed is what causes migrants to risk their lives to come to Europe and why the European Union (EU) immigration policy is failing such people. But these questions seem to be falling on deaf ears.

EU immigration law requires refugees to request asylum in the first country that they enter. Many migrants, however, do not want to stay in countries such as Italy, Spain or Greece. The result is that they are shuttled from one place to another or returned to their country of origin. Some mutilate their fingers so that their point of entry cannot be traced through fingerprinting, according to government and aid sources.

Most of those in Calais wish to go to Britain where they think life will be better, but British officials have not done much to help resolve the dilemma, activists say.

“Why is the phenomenon of Calais continuing? Because the official policies aren’t working,” Violaine Carrere, a spokeswoman for the Paris-based GISTI (Group for Information and Support to Immigrants), told IPS.

“The authorities don’t seem interested in finding a real solution. They just don’t want the migrants to become too visible,” she added. “As soon as they are visible, the government launches a huge publicity campaign and moves in with the police. And then it starts all over again. The problem has been the same for 11 years now.”

Immigration minister Besson says he does want to find a solution. Over the past months, he has given the appearance of being one of the busiest of French ministers, sending out dozens of communiqués and holding briefings even on a Sunday.

“Illegal immigration constitutes an attack on our republican pact as well as on our economic and social pact,” Besson said, as he oversaw the signing of an agreement between the French railway network SNCF and the national union of security firms to halt the hiring of ‘illegal’ workers, among other ‘good’ practices.

“With the unemployment rate of non-European nationals approaching 30 percent, to unconditionally welcome on our soil all the foreign nationals who would like to come, and to ‘regularise’ them, would only have the appearance of generosity. Such a policy would backfire against the foreigners themselves,” he added.

Besson said that one of his main objectives was to fight against migrant- trafficking networks, and that last year 4,734 traffickers had been apprehended by police forces, including 1,400 employers.

Speaking to journalists at a previous conference, Besson said that the number of people granted asylum in 2009 and the number who attained French nationality showed that France ‘remains an open country’.

According to the immigration ministry, 47,000 people requested asylum in France last year, an increase of more than 10 percent. The country issued 10,900 refugee residence permits, or ‘titres de sejour,’ up 12 percent from 2008, and up 32 percent from two years before, the ministry said.

Besson announced that the ‘asylum’ budget would increase by 10 percent in 2010, to above 318 million euros (432 million US dollars), or more than half of the ministry’s budget.

“France remains the leading country in Europe and the second in the world for the number of asylum requests received,” he said.

Overall, however, the number of ‘titres de sejour’ delivered last year decreased by nearly four percent as ‘professional’ and family immigration fell, linked to the economic crisis. Both legal and ‘illegal’ migration flows declined in 2009, Besson said.

But the government would like to see illegal migration eliminated altogether. Officials have in fact expressed fears of France becoming like Italy, with “migrants arriving on rafts,” as French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it in a recent televised interview.

His comments came a few days after 123 migrants, most of whom said they were Kurds from Syria, landed or were deposited by traffickers on a beach in Corsica on Jan. 21. The government moved swiftly to transfer the migrants to detention centres on mainland France, but nearly all were later freed by local magistrates.

Sarkozy said those who were not real asylum seekers would be repatriated, although it was unclear how they arrived on Corsica.

“If we don’t do this, the criminal networks of the whole world will come to the conclusion that they can land these poor people as they see fit on the beaches of France,” the president said in the interview on French television channel TF1.

But this depiction of waves of migrants landing on French beaches only caters to xenophobia and is “absolutely scandalous,” says Carrere of GISTI.

“The decision of local judges to free the migrants in the Corsica case was a complete denouncement of the government’s policy,” she said. “You cannot lock up people just because they are seeking asylum.

“It’s EU policies that help to create the migratory flows and the situation would be quickly resolved if civilian organisations were allowed to do what’s necessary,” she told IPS. “But does the government want this? Xenophobia and institutional racism is becoming the official policy in France and most of Europe.”

She said groups such as those providing aid in Calais should be allowed to help the migrants without official clampdowns.

No Borders meanwhile said it would continue its efforts in Calais. “We demand an immediate end of the repression against volunteers in Calais and the opening of the border between Britain and France,” the group said.

“While the French government is responsible for the police repression, both the French and the British governments are responsible for the desperate situation of the migrants, who are not allowed to enter Britain to claim asylum or refugee status,” it said in a statement.