Fighting racism: lessons from France
By Sam Wainwright
Last August 23, police smashed down the doors of the Saint Bernard Church in Paris. Using handcuffs and chloroform, they dragged out the illegal immigrants sheltering inside and put them on an Air France charter to Africa. In a last desperate act of defiance, the deportees trashed the interior of the plane.
Nowadays recalcitrant deportees are handcuffed and have their mouths taped over to prevent them shouting, biting or spitting; some have suffocated to death as a result. Former interior minster Jean-Louis Debre justified his government's crackdown by describing "illegals" as being like people who "... walk through your front door without asking and help themselves to the fridge".
While the violently anti-immigrant far-right National Front (FN) party criticises the government for not being hard enough on migrants, both the Socialist Party and conservative governments have now adopted most of the proposals contained in the anti-immigration program put forward in the early 1980s.
In France, as in Australia, since the late '70s there has been an increase in unemployment, poverty and social insecurity, exacerbated by Socialist Party and conservative governments whose cuts to social spending and privatisation have forced working people to bear the burden.
Eager to divert people's attention from the real causes of hardship, successive governments and the media started pushing the "immigration problem" myth, implying that there was some sort of connection between economic ills and immigration. Across Europe, the racist scapegoating of migrants has become mainstream politics.
France used to have some of the most liberal immigration laws in Europe; now it is leading the charge to close the door.
Not only is it getting harder to gain entry to France, but those who do find themselves in an increasingly precarious position. Laws passed this year introduced compulsory fingerprinting for permanent residency applicants, give police greater search powers and reduce the avenues for appeal.
Those who do get permanent residency permits can have them revoked following a criminal conviction for drink driving or marijuana possession. The recently elected Socialist Party government has promised only to review, not scrap, these draconian laws.
Politicians claim that they are not against migrants and immigration but only against "illegals" who don't play by the rules. This is completely hypocritical because government policy has, in effect, created "illegals" from those who used to be legal. Furthermore, scapegoating migrants for unemployment and other problems is racist in and of itself.
The distinction between "genuine" legal immigrants and "illegals" is all the more grotesque considering why people from the world's poor countries seek to live in Europe. Poverty and hardship in their countries of origin are the result of their super-exploitation by the rich countries, which then deny the victims of this process the right to a better life.
At the same time as Germany is expelling tens of thousands of eastern Europeans, Volkswagen is expanding its operations in the Czech Republic, where labour costs are much lower. Even in the dying days of the Mobutu dictatorship, France was deporting political asylum seekers back to Zaire.
European integration is universally hailed by the French and German media and politicians as the happy coming together of an extended family. However, while the borders within western Europe are coming down, walls are going up around it. Anti-racist activists call the process "Fortress Europe" — creating an island of wealth and privilege from which the poor people to the south and east are excluded.
This environment has nurtured the growth of the neo-fascist National Front. Its positions are a mixture of Catholic fundamentalism, extreme nationalism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, wrapped up in populist anti-system rhetoric designed to appeal to white workers.
The FN is openly racist and calls for the immediate expulsion of all "foreigners", including those with full French citizenship. FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen refers to the Jewish holocaust as a "detail of history" and states his belief in the "inferiority of some races".
The FN has grown dramatically since the early 1980s, when it polled about 1.5%. Today it controls four town councils, and in last May's General Assembly elections it averaged a nationwide vote of 14.9%, its highest ever at that level.
The responsibility for the FN's growth lies squarely at the door of successive Socialist Party and conservative governments. In the first instance they have exacerbated the poverty and insecurity suffered by working people. This and the crisis of credibility in "mainstream" politics has created a hearing for the FN.
Secondly, by participating in the creation of the "immigration problem" myth, they have legitimised anti-immigrant racism, the cornerstone of FN policy.
Despite the rise in popularity of the FN, some French politicians still preach the "ignore it and it will go away" line. In March, as people prepared to demonstrate in the city of Strasbourg, where the FN was holding its national conference, government ministers advised people not to attend the protest because this "would only give the FN more publicity".
Fortunately, few took that advice, and 70,000 people marched through the city while only 2000 attended the FN's conference.
The French experience very clearly demonstrates that we can not rely on "respectable" mainstream politicians to prevent the rise of organisations like the FN. In fact, the opposite is true.
Not only have French governments created the context which has stimulated the FN's growth; in many ways they benefit from its existence. With the FN always calling for more extreme measures, the government's own racist anti-immigrant policies seem moderate by comparison.
Seeing the growth of the FN, some Socialist Party leaders have floated the idea of banning it. This idea is both unworkable and highly counterproductive. It would be impossible to outlaw a party like the FN, which has a mass membership and representation in local government and the national legislature. Even if it were outlawed, the FN would continue to exist.
Such calls give the FN the opportunity to cast itself as the victim, which dovetails with its populist pitch that it is fighting for and with the struggling white battler. Furthermore, discussions about banning the FN distract people's attention away from the real causes of their insecurities and the rise of racism.
Opinion polls published in Le Monde in May showed that more than 70% of French people believe that the FN represents a threat to democracy. This is not due to the "respectable" politicians, who claim to be against racism, but to the strength and vibrancy of the French anti-racist movement. This movement has both mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in marches, meetings and other forms of protest and condemned the racism implicit in government policy
When the previous government introduced a raft of repressive anti-immigrant legislation in late February, almost spontaneously 100,000 people marched through the streets of Paris. Similar demonstrates took place in other centres.
So loud and widespread was the opposition that the government was forced to withdraw one measure, which required people to register with the authorities any foreigner staying with them.
The renewed vibrancy of the French anti-racist movement and its preparedness to go beyond general denunciations of racism and directly confront government policy are in part due to the example set by the "illegals" themselves. Many are organised as collectives of sans papiers (people without documents) and have occupied churches and government buildings demanding permanent residency status.
These courageous moves by an extremely vulnerable section of the population have inspired many others to take a stand against racism. They have also compelled the movement to reject the false and racist distinction between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants and "genuine" and "non-genuine" refugees. In its place the anti-racist movement has increasingly raised the slogan "Let them all stay!".