Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France
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Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France
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Overview
Reinventing the Republic chronicles the struggle of the sans-papiers to become rights-bearing citizens, and links different social movements to reveal the many ways in which concepts of citizenship and nationality intersect with debates over gender, sexuality, and immigration. Drawing on in-depth interviews and a variety of texts, this disquieting book provides new insights into how exclusion and discrimination operate and influence each other in the world today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804757621 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/03/2010 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Sales rank: | 916,522 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Reinventing the Republic
GENDER, MIGRATION, AND CITIZENSHIP IN FRANCEBy Catherine Raissiguier
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5762-1
Chapter One
SANS-PAPIERS: PEOPLE AND MOVEMENTS
Like all undocumented immigrants, we are regular people. Most of us have lived among you for many years. We migrated to France with the willingness to work and because we had been told that it was "the fatherland of men's [sic] rights." We could no longer stand the poverty and oppression that reigned in our countries. We wanted full bellies for our children. We were dreaming of liberty. Sans-Papiers Manifesto
IN THE SPRING OF 1996, postcolonial immigrants launched a resistance movement that has redrawn the boundaries of grassroots immigrant politics in France. The sans-papiers organized early as collectives and demanded that the French state legalize their status. The movement gained national and international attention when, in August of 1996, in Paris, the police forcibly removed three hundred sans-papiers from the Saint-Bernard church, which they had occupied for two months. The movement soon extended to the whole country, and sans-papiers collectives have since appeared throughout the European Union.
My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, I introduce the sans-papiers who launched the movement and frame their struggle within immigrant politics in France. Then I examine the participation of women in the first two years of the movement (March 1996 to June 1997). By analyzing the writings and speeches of Madjiguène Cissé, the coverage of the conflict by the French media, and secondary sources on the sans-papiers, I explore the ways in which gender relations played an important but undocumented role in the emergence of this social movement. I also begin to highlight the presence and impact of immigrant women within the French politics of immigration.
WHO ARE THE SANS-PAPIERS?
Where do we come from, we Sans-Papiers of Saint-Bernard? It is a question we are often asked, and a pertinent one. We didn't immediately realise ourselves how relevant this question was. But as soon as we tried to carry out a "site inspection," the answer was very illuminating: We are all from former French colonies, most of us from West-African countries: Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Mauritania. But there are also among us several Maghreb people (Tunisians, Moroccans and Algerians); there is one man from Zaïre and a couple who are Haitians.
The sans-papiers of Saint-Bernard were refugees and immigrants who for the most part were ushered into the realm of illegality by immigration laws that had become increasingly restrictive since the mid-1970s. In particular, the Pasqua laws contributed to the creation of the sans-papiers and gave impulse to their movement. These laws made it impossible for several categories of immigrants to obtain a change of status (régularisation) although they were de facto, if not de jure, nondeportable primarily because of their attachment to France through family linkages. As a result, thousands of legal residents in France were structurally located in a social and civil underground with no access to legal work or to social and civil protections: "Most of us entered the French territory legally. We have been thrown into illegality through the tightening of [French] laws[....] Without papers we are without rights."
Among these three hundred sans-papiers one could find asylum seekers whose case files (dossiers) had previously been rejected (déboutés du droit d'asile), spouses or children of legal immigrants, parents of children born in France, and parents of French children. Most of them had entered the country between 1980 and 1990. The vast majority of the Saint-Bernard's sans-papiers were from sub-Saharan Africa-most of them from Mali. More than half were women and children (eighty women and one hundred children, to be specific). All of the sans-papiers from the Saint-Bernard collective were members of France's former colonies. The composition of the sans-papiers population has changed over time. Today, for instance, one might find immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as from China in sans-papiers collectives.
For obvious reasons, it is impossible to draw an accurate sociological portrait of undocumented immigrants in France. However, we can assume that undocumented immigrants share some of the characteristics and some of the trajectories of other recent "legal" immigrants. I use French census figures to delineate these characteristics and trajectories, and draw from official reports on the exceptional régularisation procedures of 1981 to 1982 and 1997 to 1998 to expose the complex and changing sociological realities of the French sans-papiers. 10 Capturing the sociological contours of the sans-papières experience is even more difficult, because French statistical reports recurrently fail to provide gender-specific figures.
Immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa arrived in France fairly recently. In 1962, immigrants from the African continent constituted almost 15 percent of the total immigrant population in France. However, the vast majority of these immigrants originated from the Maghreb, with 11.6 percent from Algeria, 1.1 percent from Morocco, 1.5 percent from Tunisia, and a mere 0.7 percent from all other African countries. Their numbers remained fairly low until 1975: they were 1.4 percent of the total immigrant population in 1968 and 2.4 percent in 1975. This proportion reached 4.3 percent in 1982 and 6.6 percent in 1990. This is also the period in which women from these communities began to enter massively into France.
Two exceptional regularization procedures implemented under socialist leadership in 1981 and 1997 provide interesting data on the social location of undocumented immigrants in France. In each case, the French state created an exceptional mechanism through which undocumented immigrants could obtain a change of status according to a specific set of criteria. Official reports investigating a sample of the successful candidates for each procedure provide useful if somewhat incomplete information on the sans-papiers. In 1981, 142,000 of the 150,000 case files deposited were granted a change of status. Although the numbers given for the 1997 procedure differ greatly, most official reports state that 80,000 of the 144,000 case files deposited between November 1997 and December 1998 received a positive response. Background information on successful applicants for both procedures document that the vast majority of them had migrated to France from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Chinese immigrants began to appear in sizeable numbers only in the 1997 procedure, where they represented almost 10 percent of all successful case files.
By comparing the two procedures, we can highlight major differences between the two groups of immigrants. The 1981 procedure granted a change of status to undocumented immigrants who were mostly men (83.5 percent), had not resided in France for very long (only 10 percent had been there for more than six years), and were almost all employed at the time of the procedure (95.3 percent). In contrast, women represented almost half (49.3 percent) of those who obtained a change of status in 1997; 61 percent of these undocumented immigrants had resided in France for more than six years, and only 31.3 percent of them declared having a job at the time of the procedure.
What data gathered from the 1981 and 1997 procedures also tell us is that, beyond a certain shared précarité, undocumented immigrants who obtained a change of status came from a wide range of social backgrounds and countries of origin. They also presented a broad and diverse spectrum of personal circumstances before and after arriving in France. Finally, the data also tell us that undocumented immigrants are not the most desperate and deprived of all the candidates for international migration. The educational attainment of the undocumented immigrants who obtained a change of status in 1997 to 1998, for instance, was fairly high. Indeed, around 60 percent of them had between six and ten years of schooling, with the highest educational attainment levels found among nationals from China and the lowest found among nationals from Mali. One in ten of the successful candidates declared having had some tertiary education.
Most of them were employed prior to leaving their country. Indeed, 60 percent of them were engaged in some form of labor, while others were either students (20 percent) or not engaged in any labor activity (20 percent). Here gender differences are striking: 40 percent of the women stated that they were not engaged in work or education prior to coming to France, whereas only 6 percent of the men fell into the same category. The proportion of students in secondary or tertiary education, however, was roughly the same for men and women. The lower rate of labor participation for women, the authors of one report suggest, is partially due to the fact that women often work in a family farm or business where they are typically not perceived (even by themselves) as actual workers.
Finally, these reports corroborate national census figures on the increased presence of "families" and children among immigrants from certain communities in the 1980s and the 1990s. Undocumented immigrants granted a change of status in 1997 were more likely than those granted one in 1981 to be accompanied by a spouse and children. In 1981 the vast majority of the successful candidates (62 percent) were single. In 1997 only 30 percent of the case files fell into that category. Differences between national groups were also noted, with more families found among the Chinese and more isolated men among the Africans. In 1997, 60 percent of the case files were those of individuals who had children living with them in France at the time of the procedure.
The women and children photographed (but unseen) by French journalists in the summer of 1996 were newcomers to the French immigration scene. In many ways, these women and children are the disturbing reminders that immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, like other immigrants before them, are here to stay. What seems different about these children and women is that they are at the very heart of a social movement that is engaging the very foundation of the French Republic. This is not to say, of course, that immigrant women before the Saint-Bernard sans-papières were not involved in political struggles. In La cause des sans-papiers, which charts the history of the sans-papiers and their particular forms of political organizing, Johanna Siméant documents that women have regularly been involved within sans-papiers struggles, including participating in hunger strikes. Siméant highlights the decentralized nature of these struggles and suggests that, because they are less controlled by men than the struggles organized within traditional immigrant organizations, women might find it easier to invest themselves within sans-papiers mobilizations.
The Saint-Bernard struggle, however, was exceptional in that it was the first time that family units including mothers and children were part and parcel of the direct actions generated by the movement. Different also were the tactics and strategies deployed by these sans-papiers. Current sans-papiers struggles have emerged from a long history of immigrant organizing in France, having borrowed and transformed its strategies in new and interesting ways.
THE MOVEMENT AND ITS STRATEGIES
We have always thought that we had the right to demand papers. Bereft of fundamental human rights, turned into illegal aliens (clandestins) by the constant modifications of French laws [...] we had to question France-its institutions and its public opinion.
The sans-papiers I analyze here initiated their struggle on March 18, 1996, by occupying the church of Saint-Ambroise in Paris. During the four days that preceded their expulsion from the church, the group constituted a case file for each sans-papiers, around which to organize the demand for a collective change of status. Between March 22 and June 28, 1996, three hundred sans-papiers moved out into the street and occupied numerous public spaces, including two churches, a theater, a leftist bookstore, a union local, and an unused railway site.
The sans-papiers' choice of a public and collective display of their presence on French territory is the first, and probably most important, element of the movement's strategy. The sans-papiers creatively appropriated, transformed, and politicized the (in)visible, precarious, and nomadic character of their lived experiences. Through a series of performative iterations of the impossible social location in which they find themselves (many of them can be neither regularized nor deported), the sans-papiers have produced what I call a politics of the impossible. I use the term impossible here to mean that it is the very social conditions of impossibility that have helped produce the movement's political strategies. Impossible also suggests the unruly quality of the movement. Finally, it accounts for the built-in dangers of a politics that borrows (because it has to) the language and grammar of the French Republic.
The Saint-Bernard sans-papiers, in a collective form of street theater, enacted their refusal to be turned into outlaws and illegal immigrants (clandestins) by the French authorities. In the process, they were able to do two contradictory things: bring themselves back into and unsettle the logic of the human rights discourse at the core of the French republican model, and position themselves as subjects under French law while critiquing the inner workings of the law itself. "We are not illegal immigrants. We appear in broad daylight."
A collective "coming out" of the closet of their state-created and forced clandestine status, then, is at the heart of the sans-papiers' tactics. By making their presence visible, they are forcing the French state to address a situation that it would much rather sweep under the rug. As long as the sans-papiers remain dispersed, hidden, and silent, they can fill the positions that eagerly await them in the underground economy. They can be brandished as symbols of France's economic and social woes. They can be dramatically carded, singled out, and deported in order to appease anti-immigrant feelings in the general population and, more specifically, among the followers of neo-fascist Jean-Marie LePen. Although successful on many levels-the movement did force the French state to address the sans-papiers and to redress some of the legal nightmares it had created-such a strategy is not without risk: "We, sans-papiers of France, have decided, by signing this manifesto, to come out of the shadows. From now on, in spite of the risks it creates for us, it is not only our faces, but also our names that will be revealed." By putting their names on the line, the sans-papiers have also become more vulnerable to tracking and forced deportation. The sans-papiers' insistence that they are not illegal but rather assigned a location that makes it impossible for them to participate fully in French society is a contradictory move. On the one hand, it brilliantly points to the discursive and material processes that construct impossible subjects of the French Republic. On the other hand, because the sans-papiers do borrow the language of the Republic to make their claims, they at once are bound by and reinscribe its binary and exclusionary grammar. For instance, by pointing out that most sans-papiers are not clandestins, they end up reinforcing distinctions between "good" immigrants (those who entered France legally) and "bad" ones (those who did not).
Looking at the various locales that the sans-papiers inhabited during the spring of 1996 helps us trace the kinds of linkages they established with segments of French civil society. After their expulsion from Saint-Ambroise, the sans-papiers received a wide range of (mixed) support from antiracist, labor, and humanitarian organizations; progressive clergy; leftist groups; and French intellectuals and artists. The second strategy used by the sans-papiers, then, is their reliance on allies from a variety of organized and unorganized sources and their claim to autonomy and self-determination.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reinventing the Republic by Catherine Raissiguier Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures....................ixPreface....................xi
Acknowledgments....................xv
Introduction: Taking On the Republic....................1
1 Sans-Papiers: People and Movements....................14
2 Framing the Sans-Papières....................32
3 The Legal Construction of Immigrant Women in France....................54
4 Family Matters: Immigration, Demography, and National Politics....................72
5 Of Polish Plumbers and Senegalese Cleaning Ladies....................91
6 Nanas, Pédés, Immigrés: Solidarité?....................112
Conclusion....................129
Appendix....................137
Notes....................141
Bibliography....................173
Index....................185