PARIS, 21 October — Only a week after a decision by French President Jacques Chirac to set up a major new policy on immigration, France appears to be sending out contradictory signals with regard to how the new immigration policy is to be applied.
Although the policy attempts to draw a clear line as to which immigrants are "desirable," and those who are not, recent decisions by the French government seem to be taken on a wholly different basis.
In Lyons, for example, six paperless immigrants who had gone on a hunger strike in Eglise Saint-Andre were told yesterday by the local prefect that they would be awarded temporary residency and work papers if they would cease their hunger strike, which was into its eighth week. A seventh striker had to be transported earlier in the week to Edouard Herriot hospital because his condition had become grave.
A representative of the local human rights organization, the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH), said, however, that he found the governmental decision "unfortunate," for he felt that the decision to award papers or not should be taken according to wholly different criteria.
"The way things are," said Jacques Dumortier, the local representative of the LDH, "such decisions could push people to suicide, just as this decision required six paperless immigrants to go without food for 57 days, with a seventh man close to death in hospital. The papers should really be attributed from now on by going through the regular channels."
But as far as the several thousand paperless immigrants, who marched in Paris yesterday, are concerned papers should be given out neither at the end of a hunger strike, or through regular channels, but simply to everybody presently on French soil who asks for them — a wholesale regularization, like the decision recently taken by Italy.
Meanwhile, at the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, French authorities were having difficulty finding candidates for another new policy that accords 2000 euros to each Afghan refugee ready and willing to return to Kabul, and this with a government-paid airline ticket. In spite of the great deal of publicity recently given the program French authorities have so far found only five takers for the new program.
