Immigration round-up

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 this morning, with Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. The audio clip will be posted once it is available on the BBC website.

In France, immigration minister Brice Hortefeux has been replaced by Eric Besson, an ex-Socialist who quit Segolene Royal's presidential campaign last year to support Nicolas Sarkozy.

Another day in Europe's war on immigration

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 in Italy, who are the targets of an increasingly violent anti-immigrant backlash. El Pais has the full story.

3. A 32-year old Moroccan woman, who is married to a Frenchman and has 3 children who were born in France, has had her normally automatic request for French citizenship denied for wearing a burqa, which France's constutional council deems "incompatible with the fundamental values of the French community, and notably equality between men and women." Full article in French in Le Monde.

Rachida Dati: face of a new France, or political token?

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 origin, and grew up in a poor housing estate in Burgundy, the second of 12 children of a Moroccan bricklayer and an illiterate Algerian mother. Educated at a Catholic school and a state lycée, she used a series of part-time jobs – selling cosmetics door-to-door, working in a supermarket and as a hospital nurse – to fund her way through school and university, culminating in the prestigious HEC business school.

Dati's political views are often objectionable, but you have to admire her personal achievements.

Ben Hall has written an interesting profile of her in the FT. It concludes:

Azouz Begag, a former junior minister for equalities in the centre-right government and son of Algerian immigrants, paid tribute to her success: “She is what a lot of the kids on the estates want. The boys want to be Zinédine Zidane and all the girls want to be Rachida Dati." But it is totally misleading.”

However, he argues, she has left her Muslim origins too far behind. “Her message is: I’m like you. I am one of you. I like power. I like luxury. It works because the majority of French people simply want to be wealthy and she embodies that aspiration. As long as the political classes use tokens, who are appointed rather than elected, who are conformist rather than independent-minded personalities, there will not be elected politicians from ethnic minorities.”

Ms Dati will have to prove she is more than a symbol if she is really to represent a new France.

Four questions for Sarkozy, Europe's wannabe immigrant scourge

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 a Hungarian immigrant, such claptrap is particularly disappointing and hypocritical. Young Sarkozy may always have thought that he was destined for greatness, but the French authorities who admitted his parents could not have known. Had Sarkozy's parents been turned away, President Bling Bling would not be in office and, dare I say it, Carla would not be the jewel in his crown.

The cruel irony of Sarko's proposals is that far from protecting Europe from the perceived threat of immigration, they would do further damage to Europe's stuttering economies and ageing societies.

Does Sarko honestly think that his anti-immigrant rhetoric is conducive to attracting the high-skilled migrants that the EU is wooing with its new "blue card" proposal?

Is it really in Europe's interests to try to round up illegal workers, at a time when a greying continent is struggling to find people to look after the growing number of elderly Europeans who need care?

Does anyone think that such a crackdown will succeed?

Is it not a recipe for fracturing society rather than protecting it?

Will France open up to immigration?

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 risk their lives trying to come work in France. What, then, are we to make of reports that the commission looking at how to boost the French economy set up by Sarkozy and headed by Jacques Attali, a confidant of the late Socialist president Mitterrand, plans to recommend an increase in immigration as means of revitalising the French economy?

Attali's logic is impeccable. Just consider how Britain, Ireland, Spain and Sweden have boomed in recent years, as migrant workers from Poland and the other new EU member states, as well as from further afield, have given their economies a new lease of life. Spain's foreign population has soared in recent years - and so has the employment rate among Spaniards. France and Germany, meanwhile, continue to fret about the threat from the much-maligned Polish plumber.

With France's growth slowing, its sclerotic labour market could do with an infusion of foreign blood - of hard-working, enterprising people who are willing to do the jobs that French people can't or won't. In so doing, they would create new jobs for French jobs, both through their increased spending power, and in complementary lines of work. France's economy would grow faster - a priority for Sarkozy and voters.

Although Sarkozy is notoriously erratic and opportunistic - a political jackdaw, rather than a man of principle - it seems unlikely that he will perform an about-turn on immigration. But here's hoping that when Attali presents his report to Sarkozy on 23 January, the president sees sense.

A Pyrrhic 'victory' for France's Socialists

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.

In the near term, Sunday's results are good for democracy: every government needs a strong opposition to hold it to account and curb its excesses. When opposition in parliament is puny, critics are more likely to take to the streets instead.

Paradoxically, though, the Socialists' relative success may harm their longer-term electoral prospects. Had the PS done disastrously badly, the pressure for reforming the party would have been overwhelming. It would have been easier for it to follow in the footsteps of its counterparts in Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain and become a modern - and thus electable - social-democratic party, along the lines suggested by Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

There is still hope. But Sunday's results risk fostering the delusion that an unreformed PS can win in 2012 and thus help the party's dinosaurs to stifle much-needed change.

A Socialist ought to have been a shoo-in for the presidency this year. With President Chirac discredited after 12 years in office and the outgoing UMP government deeply unpopular, French voters were aching for a change. Yet it was Nicolas Sarkozy, a long-time minister in that administration, who seized the mantle of change, while Ségolène Royal stumblingly embodied the status quo.

The Socialists have not won a legislative election since 1997, a presidential one since 1988. The Left's combined share of the vote in the first round of this year's legislative election was its lowest since the Fifth Republic began in 1958.

It would be a big mistake to intepret the second-round bounce as a Socialist revival. More likely, it reflects voters' second thoughts about granting the UMP a crushing majority, combined with fears about the new government's ill-timed and poorly explained proposal to hike VAT.

If the Socialists are to stand a chance of winning power again, they must embrace reform. The long-term health of French democracy depends on it. After the marginalisation of François Bayrou's centrist Modem party, only a modernised Socialist Party can pose a viable alternative to the UMP.

Illegal immigrants discovered doing up French president's residence

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

The company that hired the foreign builders, who have been working for it since 2004, says it was unaware their IDs were fake.

Policemen guarding the residence of La Lanterne, where Cecilia Sarkozy plans to live, recently realised the IDs were fake.

The Malian immigrants are apparently to be deported, according to France 2 TV news.

They were good enough to do up the French president's house, it seems, but not good enough to be allowed to stay. Shame.

Hortefeux's vile hypocrisy

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.

Not, of course, at the immorality of Europe's border controls, which cause so many unnecessary deaths, but at the people-smugglers he holds responsible.

Of course, there are some nasty characters who profit from people's despair. But the only reason people need to resort to them in the first place is because it is impossible for Africans to come work in Europe legally.

Such vile hypocrisy from Hortefeux - and indeed from his boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, who must thank his lucky stars that France was more welcoming to his foreign father than he now is to others trying to cross borders in search of a better life.

France relives deportation horror

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, their descendants are giving refuge to the sans papiers that interior minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to deport. 

Sarkozy clearly has no chance of expelling more than a handful of the 300,000 or so illegals believed to be living in France, but his crackdown is still causing immense suffering, as families are broken up, shuttled around, and made to live in constant fear. But then his real aim is not to throw them all out: it is to curry favour with far-right voters in next year's presidential election.

A similar noxious logic applies in tomorrow's US Congressional elections. Vulnerable Republican candidates do not seriously believe that the US can stick all the country's 12 million illegal residents in cattle carts and send them south, but threatening to do so should still win them some crucial votes and give them a glimmer of hope of clinging on to power.

A hollow victory for the French Left

The protesters claimed the revolutionary mantle of 1968, defying the government and symbolically occupying the Sorbonne. President Chirac, rightly described by Jon Henley as having achieved nothing of substance during his long tenure in office, stood firm to his principles: when the going gets tough, cut and run to save your skin. Yesterday's climbdown by Chirac's prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was therefore entirely predictable. The only surprise is that Chirac endured two months of plummeting poll ratings before finally buckling to demands from students and trade unions that a new youth employment law be withdrawn.

The leader of the Socialist party duly greeted "the climbdown by the powers-that-be". The Communist party hailed it as "a great victory for the people". But it is nothing of the sort. Yes, the street won, but the people on the street were privileged insiders defending their vested interests, not a popular uprising of the dispossessed. As I noted in a previous post, although the government's proposed "contract of first employment" was half-baked, the protesters do not have right on their side. They are set against the root-and-branch reform that France is crying out for - and buoyed by their latest victory they are in a stronger position than ever to resist change. Under the egalitarian pretence of job security for all, the French system that the protesters defend swells the ranks of the long-term unemployed and the permanently excluded, creating an economically wasteful, politically fractious and morally distasteful underclass.

With the mainstream and even the extreme left fighting for the interests of one set of insiders against another, the true outsiders in French society have no champions, and scarcely even a voice. In that respect, they are worse off than the American underclasses at whose plight the French recoil in horror. The desperate rioting that spilled over from France's suburbs last year provoked fear and loathing, not understanding and reform. So even though the left has won its latest bunfight with the right, the real losers are those on the margins of society that the left ought to be fighting for.