Philippe Legrain

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In France, immigration minister Brice Hortefeux has been replaced by Eric Besson, an ex-Socialist who quit Segolene Royal's presidential campaign last year to support Nicolas Sarkozy.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

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.

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.

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. 

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.

France's misguided protests

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 see it as an assault on young people's right to secure jobs, but de Villepin says it is essential to reduce France's youth unemployment rate of 22%. Both sides are wrong.

French myth-making

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 EU, which has exposed French workers to competition from low-wage, low-tax economies such as Poland. The upshot, they claim, is that the EU is driving social standards down and pushing unemployment up.