France's Immigrants Worry About The Future

July 01, 1993|By Sharon Waxman, Special to the Tribune.

MELUN, France — Life is about to become more difficult for people like Mansouria Saadeddine, a 38-year-old Algerian immigrant in France, and her six Algerian children. The housekeeper's last 20 years on French soil have been tranquil, but she and her neighbors are worried.

"This is all we hear about on television: immigration, nationality code, police checks. They talk about it all the time. It's not a good sign," Saadeddine said, shaking her head outside a town meeting on new anti-immigration measures in this community south of Paris.

As parliament works to approve a more rigid nationality code and a crackdown on illegal immigration, even France's legal immigrants are worried that discrimination-particularly against Arab and African foreigners-may become more common.

"We've never had problems before. We were never worried when they talked about clandestine immigrants," said Abbassia Guemar, Saadeddine's friend. "But now we're really worried."

They are not the only ones. Two senior ministers wrote recently to Premier Edouard Balladur asking for reconsideration of some of the measures approved by parliament's lower house, the National Assembly, and now awaiting a vote in the Senate.

Social Affairs Minister Simone Veil expressed fears that the new code might encourage xenophobia. Justice Minister Pierre Mehaignerie asked for modifications "to avoid making foreigners who are here legally feel as if they are to be the victims of discrimination."

The premier agreed to soften the legislation's language, but won't change the essence of the bills slated for a Senate vote sometime next week.

France has as many as 500,000 illegal immigrants and about 3 million legal immigrants on its soil, many of them from former French colonies and territories in Africa. The government is under pressure to counter illegal immigration while French unemployment runs at nearly 11 percent.

The new legislation, named for hard-line Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, would attempt to end immigrants' fake marriages to French women and to deport clandestine workers.

The Interior Ministry, which will take over requests for political asylum from the Foreign Ministry, already is issuing more restrictive guidelines for giving work and residence permits to foreigners.

The new nationality code would allow French-born children of foreigners to have French citizenship if an investigation shows they have not committed a felony before the age of 21.

One much-feared new measure would put thousands of police on the streets to conduct random identity checks, a move that human rights groups worry might lead to racist incidents.

"Although in principle I believe that any democratic government must have some security controls, I also know that in practice it will be blacks and Arabs who take it on the chin. It's inevitable," said Areski Damanhi, head of France Plus, a government-funded group that promotes racial integration.

"These measures will create a ghetto within the ghetto," predicted Abbes Benazzouz, an activist with the group SOS Racisme.

"The foreigners are already in the ghettos. You add these measures and I don't know where we're going. We'll see the consequences in five years."

Benazzouz said the measures are the wrong way to attack unemployment, co-opting the arguments of the extreme right wing.

"It's a chain reaction: insecurity, violence, immigration," he said. "The biggest worry of the French today is unemployment. So instead of helping the 3 million unemployed, the first thing the government does is to harass the most marginal, the most disadvantaged sector of French society."

Immigrants such as Saadeddine have been content to live in France without applying for citizenship, since a mere residence permit allows them to benefit from France's extensive social welfare system.

Though their status isn't technically threatened by the new laws, Saadeddine and Guemar are still concerned that the mood in France is turning against them.

"To go back to Algeria would be a catastrophe," Saadeddine said. "Our children don't even speak Arabic."