Philippe Legrain

France’s draft plan to ban on wearing the burqa would involve a fine of €150 for wearing the full veil, Le Monde reports. Anyone forcing a woman to wear a full veil faces up to a year in prison and a €15,000 fine. Meanwhile, Belgium’s draft law would make it a crime to wear clothing [...]

In Britain, the government is today publishing its long-awaited citizenship, immigration and borders bill. It proposes that prospective citizens should have to "earn" British citizenship after going through a probationary period. I have written a critique of the earned-citizenship proposals here. I debated whether Britain still needs immigration in a recession of Radio Five Live [...]

1. Nine young children and six adults have died, with four more in a very serious state, in the latest tragic attempt by Africans to reach Europe. Full article in Spanish at El Pais; photos here. 2. The European Parliament has passed a motion demanding that the Berlusconi government stop collecting the fingerprints of gypsies [...]

France is home to 5 million Muslims, but not a single Muslim member of parliament. So much for the success of France’s supposedly religion- and colour-blind republic. Sarkozy’s controversial justice minister, Rachida Dati, is the first figure of Muslim origin to hold senior ministerial office in that country. She is young, female, of North African [...]

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is planning a Europe-wide crackdown on immigration when France takes over the reins of the EU in the second half of this year, according to documents seen by the FT. Not content with mismanaging France, it seems, Sarko is now determined to sow discord throughout Europe. Coming from the son of [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy won last year’s French presidential elections on an anti-immigration platform designed to curry favour with the voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist National Front. Since his election, he has tightened France’s immigration laws. His talentless lackey of an immigrant minister, Brice Hortefeux, loves talking tough about how France will deport Africans who dare [...]

It is a measure of how low expectations have sunk that France’s Socialist Party (PS) is celebrating after winning scarcely more than a third of the seats in the country’s newly elected National Assembly. Pollsters had been forecasting electoral oblivion; instead, the PS merely received a drubbing at the hands of President Sarkozy’s victorious UMP.

Immigrants from Mali with fake residence permits have been discovered working at one of President Sarkozy’s official residences.

As a French frigate returned the bodies of 18 drowned African migrants it had fished out of the sea near Malta, France’s new immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, was full of fury.

Anyone in the US, Britain or elsewhere who believes that expelling people is an easy way to reduce illegal immigration  should read this excellent article in Saturday’s Guardian about France’s flailing drive to deport illegal immigrants. In a chilling echo of the Second World War, when many brave French families hid Jews from the Gestapo, [...]

The French government’s climbdown has been hailed as a “great victory for the people”. It is nothing of the sort.

Over a million people took to the streets of France on Tuesday in protest at prime minister Dominique de Villepin’s proposed new employment law, with another national strike called for next Tuesday. Students and trade unions are bitterly opposed to the plans to make it easier for companies to hire and fire young workers. They [...]

Many French people rejected the constitution because they regard Brussels as the handmaiden of "ultra-liberal" Anglo-Saxon capitalism, intent on deregulating markets and opening up the French economy to competition. Just look, they say, at the EU’s proposed services directive, which would tear down barriers to trade in services, or at the eastward enlargement of the [...]