There is a widespread belief in France that the country is the chosen destination of international migration, a country where thousands of refugees dream of settling to begin their lives afresh. A country where they find peace and security at last, in conditions conducive to view the future with serenity, to find employment, begin a family, make friends.
This conception has it that France is admired beyond its borders for its savoir-vivre, its pleasant climate, and its generous welfare benefit system. Its only weakness is that it is too hospitable, taking in migrants without counting their numbers, without distinguishing between the deserving and the profiteering.
This self-portrait is publicly touted by politicians both of the Right and the Left, albeit in variable forms. The far-right Front National party crystallises the theme, its president Marine Le Pen recently evoking a “crashing wave” of arrivals. “When you are an asylum seeker in France, it’s automatically 11.45 euros that falls into your pocket every day,” she said in a speech to the party faithful at Brachay, in north-east France, on August 29th.
It suffices to listen to socialist interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to understand to what extent the high esteem in which the country holds itself. “For more than two centuries, France has received the oppressed and the persecuted from all horizons, true to an imperative which is as old as humanity,” declared Cazeneuve last December, when he addressed parliament during the debates of a reform of France’s asylum laws. “Well before the Geneva convention of 1951, our country has indeed given the world a definition of the right to asylum, the modernity of which is still striking. The constitution of 1793 thus proclaims that the French people are 'the friend and natural ally of free peoples', and 'gives asylum to foreigners banned from their countries in the cause of liberty'. It is no doubt there that was born the tradition of a France that is the land of asylum for the oppressed of the world, who it has received throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: Italian and polish patriots, persecuted Armenians and Jews, anti-fascist resistance members and Spanish Republicans, Soviet dissidents and Vietnamese boat people.”
It also suffices to listen to the refugees crossing into Europe in recent weeks to understand that France appears to have not only lost its appeal, but has also gained a poor reputation. For the vast majority of the 365,000 people who have made the clandestine crossing of the Mediterranean to Europe this year, mostly Syrians and Eritreans, are aiming to reach Germany, Sweden or Britain.
The German authorities expect to receive a total of 800,000 asylum requests this year, ten times more than in France. The very fact that the French authorities sought out 1,000 refugees among the 20,000 who arrived in Germany last weekend, re-settling them in France as an emergency measure to help its neighbour with the huge influx, is in itself an illustration of the little interest the refugees had in reaching France.
“3,000 people live in Calais in miserable conditions,” said François Gemenne, a political sciences researcher specialised in migration with the University of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, near Paris and with the University of Liège in Belgium. “They take every risk, including that of dying, just to leave France. That says a lot about the image of the country.”
The self-styled “country of human rights”, a recurrent phrase coined by French politicians, among others, in reference to the human rights declaration of the 1789 French revolution, has apparently lost its appeal. Those migrants attempting to reach Britain simply pass through it and, for many, their impressions of the country are stamped by the situation in the Channel port of Calais. There migrants are regularly chased by police and live in utmost poverty in the insalubrious, makeshift camp which has become known as “the jungle”.
Tahir, an Ethiopian interviewed by Mediapart in a temporary camp set up on a boulevard in Paris in May, said he never planned to stay in France. London, he declared, “would be my dream”. An English-speaker, he believed he would be able to easily integrate in the British capital via his contacts with what he called his “community”. In Paris, he slept on the street in the open air on a mattress, without any shelter.
Earlier this month, Mediapart met up with Syrian and Iraqi refugees crossing, via the Balkans, north into Austria. At Nickelsdorf, an Austrian frontier town on the border with Hungary, a member of an Iraqi family, finally climbing on to a coach after hours of walking, said their intention was to settle in Germany: “No, no, not France.” A Syrian man, Ayham, who had fled from the devastated town of Aleppo, said he simply “hadn’t thought” about reaching France. In the train taking him and others from Vienna to Dusseldorf, Sami al-Turk, a Syrian from Homs, said his destination of choice was based on language reasons. “We learnt English at school, not French, so we’re going to a country where we can speak English,” he explained. “Sweden or Norway, one or the other. They welcome refugees there. In France, there is violence. We saw the pictures of Calais.”
In another report at the end of August, Mediapart met up with a number of migrants who had reached Sweden. One was a francophone, who had previously studied in France, but who had not considered the country as a place to settle in. Several spoke of their impression of France as being inhospitable towards them, citing the “bad behaviour” of people, and “police brutality”. The fact that many migrants ended up living on the streets in makeshift camps in Paris and Calais was another factor, they said.
The principal obstacle for refugees in France appears to be the difficulty in finding accommodation. In Sweden and Germany however, all asylum seekers are provided with accommodation as of when they begin their asylum requests. In France, asylum seekers can apply for accommodation in dedicated centres spread around the country, the centres d’accueil de demandeurs d’asile, or CADA, but these suffer from a chronic shortage of space. Just more than one third (an estimated 36%) of those who have begun the official procedure for requesting asylum are housed in the centres. Many others get by through the hospitality of relatives or friends, while others use the emergency service for the homeless in France – contactable through the 115 phone number – as a last resort to avoid sleeping in the streets, where others find themselves.
'France is no longer a major country of exile'
A reform of the law governing the rights of asylum seekers, adopted by French parliament in July, foresees the creation of additional accommodation in the CADA for 8, 200 people by the end of 2016. Taking example from the Swedish model, asylum seekers will be placed in centres around France, according to available space. Until now they were dependent upon centres in the immediate region where their asylum applications were processed, leading to a recurrent saturation of the centres, notably in and around Paris and Lyon.
The reform also aims to improve the slow and overly bureaucratic procedure for requesting asylum in France, is also often cited as an obstacle for refugees along with the fact that there is a comparatively low proportion who are granted exile. The reform hopes to slash to just nine months the current average two years for an asylum demand to be processed, but to reach that target will take some while yet.
Another major problem for refugees is finding employment. A decision introduced in 1991 by France’s then socialist government has until now prohibited asylum seekers from taking paid work during the processing of their request. Under the July reform, they are now allowed to take up employment after the first nine months. But for refugee rights groups, and even European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, this is still far from acceptable. “I am strongly in favour of allowing asylum seekers to work and earn their own money whilst their applications are being processed,” said Juncker in his ‘State of the Union’ speech to the European Parliament on September 9th. But beyond the issue of the right to work is being able to find it. France suffers from chronic unemployment, with the jobless rate at 10.3% of the active population, higher than the European average.
“François Hollande gives the impression of tagging along behind Angela Merkel,” said François Gemenne. “The exodus towards Germany is testimony to its good social and economic health. France, on the opposite, arouses mistrust.”
What emerges from the various interviews with refugees is that welfare benefits are, despite political rhetoric, of little concern their choices of destination. Importantly, while the financial amounts of benefits available to refugees vary among EU member states, they are mostly equivalent to each other once the granting of assistance such as free meals, accommodation and healthcare are taken into account.
Until now, about 200,000 migrants arrive in France every year, a figure that has remained stable over the recent period, mostly from North and West Africa. About 75% of them have moved to France to rejoin their families or to take up studies. François Héran, director of France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies, the INED, describes this influx as “ordinary immigration” linked to France’s colonial past and the influence of a common language. “Despite preconceived ideas, France is no longer, and since some while, a major country of exile, as opposed to Norway and Sweden which have a long tradition of the matter,” he said. “Germany appears as the promised land because politically it opens its arms and technically it shows itself capable of dealing with the organisation of massive arrivals, whereas France is neither physically nor morally equipped to receive extraordinary influxes.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse