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Casualties of Care
Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
By Miriam Ticktin UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95053-5
CHAPTER 1
Sans-Papiers and the Context of Political Struggle
On October 27, 2005, responding to a call about a break-in, French police chased three young boys of Arab origin in the cité (housing estate) of Clichy-sous-Bois. The boys climbed the wall of a power plant in their attempt to escape the police, and two of the boys, aged fifteen and seventeen, died, while the third suffered from severe burns. Later it was recognized that the police had chased the boys by mistake and that there was no burglary. The boys had been playing soccer with their friends in the neighborhood and had dispersed to avoid the all too familiar police harassment. In response to this event, France erupted in what were called urban "riots," which lasted for over three weeks, burning ten thousand cars and causing the arrest of nearly five thousand people. This was just three days after then–interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would rid the banlieue area of Argenteuil of racaille (scum or riffraff), by which he meant youth of immigrant origin. In response to the events, the government declared a state of emergency, using a 1955 law originally passed during the war of independence in Algeria—a move that rendered all too apparent how the borders between metropole and colony had never fully disappeared, but rather had been resurrected in new ways within the metropole itself.
These so-called riots—perhaps more accurately labeled "revolts" to recognize their political nature—opened a space in France to discuss questions of economic inequality, racial discrimination, policing, and segregation for those of immigrant descent. Quite suddenly, it seemed, France's postcolonial status was no longer a public secret: it appeared in full view, in newspapers all over the world and, more importantly, in France itself. I open with this event as one of the most visible recent political eruptions in France of the tensions surrounding questions of immigration, labor, and their related colonial histories. In other words, this was not a sudden crisis; as the "banlieue film" La Haine (Hate) had already demonstrated in 1995, in its prescient fictional depiction of riots caused by police brutality against youth of immigrant origin, it is an ongoing, unresolved situation, where racial discrimination, police and state violence, and economic inequality simmer in what are also now called "ghettos."
In this chapter, I trace the shape of political action around immigration on the ground. In what context do regimes of care come into play—what is the larger frame? My own entry into this cluster of issues began with the question of the sans-papiers. While not the same struggle as the 2005 riots, which focused attention on the plight of French citizens—mostly children of immigrant parents, born in France—the struggle of undocumented immigrants derives from many of the same unresolved issues and overlaps significantly with the questions and problems that spurred the riots. Both are shaped by France's history of colonialism as much as they are by the current context of "neoliberal" reforms. Both are a product of racially informed technologies of exclusion, and both are shaped by the history of immigrant labor. In some ways, the sanspapiers struggle is an earlier incarnation of the riots; in other ways, it is a parallel and overlapping struggle. So, taking this as my jumping-off point, I explore the political eruption of the sans-papiers in order to think about the context of its emergence and limits, and about the rise of a competing complex of institutions and practices of care. Many scholars and activists have written about the sans-papiers precisely because of the significance of the movement for new practices of citizenship and belonging; my goal is not to revisit this work, but rather to think about the nature and context of the sans-papiers political movement and why it has come to be challenged by a form of antipolitics. I say this at a time when sans-papiers are still marching, occupying churches, conducting hunger strikes, as they have since the 1970s; yet they are treated as individuals on a case-by-case basis by the state. Those who hope to be regularized must prove to be the exception—those who fit into the norm will remain undocumented. In exploring the context of the sans-papiers movement—from one of the foundational moments in 1996 to the challenges of global capitalism, colonialism, and changing practices of sovereignty—this chapter also asks, what kinds of resolutions need to happen, of past and present, for a new future to be accessible and imaginable?
THE SANS-PAPIERS
The Political Struggle
In August 1996, French riot police stormed Saint Bernard Church in Paris where three hundred or so undocumented Africans had taken refuge in their quest for papers and for basic human rights. The police broke down the church doors with axes, throwing tear gas on mothers and babies, and dragging people out. A few were deported that very night, one away from his wife and children. Madiguène Cissé, a woman of Senegalese origin and spokesperson for the sans-papiers, was strip-searched in front of her daughter, while one policewoman tried to humiliate her, taking her cell phone away from her, indicating that she, as a foreigner, had no right to it: "They've hardly come down from the trees, and they already have mobiles in their hands" (Cissé 1997, cited from Notes from Nowhere 2003:42).
The media coverage of this event prompted an immediate and vociferous reaction by the French public; they were outraged at the way the government had treated the sans-papiers. Paradoxically, polls showed that they did not object to the restrictive immigration policies that caused people to enter into situations of illegality; rather, they objected to the way these people had been treated—the complete absence of respect for basic rights. The government was chastised by all sides for breaking with France's history as the founder and home of human rights principles and, as one intellectual claimed, for breaking with the "founding principles of the social order."
The occupation of and eviction from Saint Bernard Church was the latest and most significant manifestation of a battle that has been ongoing since the early 1970s, including a series of hunger strikes. Yet with the occupation of Saint Bernard, the existence of undocumented immigrants was brought front and center, "out from the shadows" as they claimed, in a new, mediatized and politicized way. Images of the sans-papiers, consumed by the public on TV and in newspapers, jolted movie stars, film producers, and intellectuals into action in support of the sans-papiers, for what they said was the sake of human rights. The intellectual Pierre Bourdieu and movie star Emmanuelle Béart were among those who joined in. Some came to stay in the church with the sans-papiers and some spoke out to the newspapers. Still others decided to become parrains, or "godparents," to the sans-papiers to help avoid heavy-handed treatment by the police—sans-papiers carried identity cards around with them made by their godparents as a form of protection. Demonstrations abounded with human rights rhetoric—this was about the protection of basic rights and equality, the reason for the French revolution. How could France of all places deny people basic rights?
This 1996 uprising of immigrants into public space was an attempt to show the French state and public that undocumented immigrants were not criminals in hiding but, as the spokesperson Ababacar Diop stated, "We wanted to remind people that we existed and wished to be free of the illegality that French laws had thrust upon us. There was something extraordinarily simple in this vision. We were humans confronted with immense difficulties. What could be more natural than to make known our distress and to ask for a framework of negotiation with the authorities so that we could see an end to the tunnel, without animosity?" (1997b:1).
The sans-papiers took control of their own situation; while associations and mediators helped, the sans-papiers led the way, refusing to let anyone speak on their behalf. In many ways, this marked their emergence as political actors. They coined the term sans-papiers, literally "without papers," to move away from the criminality and suspicion associated with clandestinity to a focus on people deprived of basic rights. Coming together under one identity was an extraordinary achievement, since sans-papiers are a remarkably heterogeneous group. Not only do they come from many nationalities, socioeconomic classes, ages, levels of education, and linguistic groups, but there are many different reasons for their lack of papers. Some began as refugees, others as students, and still others as spouses of French nationals. It is important to note that most entered legally and lost their papers due to changes in French immigration legislation (Fassin and Morice 2000). Most notable here were the Pasqua laws of 1993, which helped to enact the center–right-wing government's "zero immigration" policy. These created a set of often contradictory requirements for all persons filing a request for legal status, which ranged from proof of uninterrupted housing and employment for those wanting to renew visas, to an abrogation of jus soli, taking away the right of those born on French soil to French citizenship and making it contingent upon an oath of loyalty and a lack of criminal record. New policing practices (an intensification of the emergency security "plan Vigipirate") were instituted as a part of this legislative package, including identity checks of anyone who looked "foreign." This came with a penalty of three months of detention for anyone who could not provide valid documents. Aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants also became a criminal offense at this time (GISTI 1994; Iskander 2007).
The sans-papiers occupied the Saint Bernard Church as a last-ditch effort in a series of occupations that began with Saint Ambroise Church in Paris in March 1996. They made two demands on the second day of the Saint Ambroise occupation: the appointment of a mediator and a moratorium on deportations. The response was their forced eviction from the church by the police, with the complicity of the clergy. The sans-papiers subsequently moved from place to place, occupying locales from the Japy gymnasium in Paris to the Cartoucherie theater in Vincennes (just outside Paris), becoming more politicized with each move, each eviction.
In a stalemate with the government, despite growing domestic and international support, the group of sans-papiers established a committee of eminent personalities (lawyers, scientists, clergymen)—a de facto College of Mediators to act as intermediaries between the authorities and themselves. The government recognized this group, and negotiations began in May 1996.
The government, then under Jacques Chirac's right-wing party (Rassemblement pour la République, or RPR), promised to examine the cases favorably; but the government went back on its promises, saying it would only give temporary (three-month) acknowledgments of residence to parents of French children. In fact, not even this was true; the twenty-two people given temporary papers were chosen arbitrarily, and the majority of sans-papiers were left in the same position as before. The sans-papiers' answer was to occupy Saint Bernard Church.
This time, the clergy helped; the priest of Saint Bernard called for a peaceful settlement. Ten sans-papiers went on a hunger strike for more than fifty days. The church was consistently full, welcoming more than two thousand visitors and supporters each day. Political leaders such as the head of the French Communist Party, Robert Hue, and the widow of former president François Mitterrand, Danielle Mitterrand, went to show their support. The media kept a constant vigil. But on August 23, 1996, for the first time ever in France, the state gave the order to invade a church. The police broke down the doors with axes and tear gas in hand.
A few months after the Saint Bernard Church affair, the Socialists came into power, helped in no small part by these demonstrations against governmental abuses of human rights. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government promised to deal with sans-papiers more generously. Once in power, they passed a law that allowed for the legalization of sans-papiers who fulfilled certain conditions. France was finally lauded for living up to its reputation as home to human rights.
The Backlash: Policing and Detention
Despite this rhetoric, the promised reexamination of cases of undocumented immigrants in 1997 and the new law in 1998 on entry and residence of foreigners were both much less generous than initially promised by the Jospin government. The reexamination of cases on the basis of more favorable criteria—an "amnesty" of sorts—only gave eighty thousand people papers, fewer than half of those who applied, and many sans-papiers still found themselves without papers, despite fulfilling the required criteria. People like the two Malian men who were deported right after the Saint Bernard eviction while their children remained in France were the flip side of the few legalized, and their deportations happened despite Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which explicitly says that the state cannot deport someone with links in that same country. The state's treatment of sans-papiers seemed as brutal and arbitrary as ever.
When I arrived in France in September 1999, some were already saying it was the aftermath of the sans-papiers movement. Although the social movement was and is still very much alive, it no longer commanded the national and international media and political attention it had in 1996. Hundreds of associations still take it as their primary mandate, each taking a different perspective, each lobbying for a slightly different constituency. These associations, from labor unions to cultural and neighborhood groups, for the most part use the language of human rights in a fight for equal citizenship, and they locate their struggles in the French tradition of respect for human rights. Yet these cries for human rights fell on now-deaf state ears—a reality that has only been confirmed and exaggerated with the turn to the right in France after the 2002 elections, and ever more so with the election of Sarkozy as president in 2007. There was and is still much violence and exploitation: I encountered many people living and enduring such situations—at home, in the workplace, and often in domestic service, for women in particular; these people had often submitted claims with appropriate documentation and yet had not been regularized. Drissia, a fifty-year-old woman of Moroccan origin I met through Rajfire, an activist network for undocumented and immigrant women, revealed to me the extent of the situation. Drissia had been in France for over ten consecutive years, which qualified her for papers according to the new law put into effect by the Socialists in 1998 (Article 12bis°3); yet, despite what immigrant rights lawyers believed was proof of her uninterrupted presence on French soil, her request had been turned down multiple times. At the monthly meetings and regular protest marches, I saw her alternate between tears and deep anger, often in one sentence, at the sheer frustration of being treated as though she did not exist. As Drissia's case illustrates, what counts as proof of uninterrupted presence is unclear—it depends on the interpretation of each immigration official. For people who have been trying to erase any trace of their presence so as not to be deported, providing official proof of each month of residence for over ten years is a nearly impossible task—practically a contradiction in terms.
Many of the people who had not been granted papers found themselves ghettoized in the banlieues, which have a particular significance in French immigration history. They are the result of discriminatory housing policies, aimed at structuring a formal outsiderness for the workforce imported from the former colonies in the 1950s and 1960s. Policing of what constitutes "normal housing" has forced all types of immigrants into this periphery; for instance, immigrants are not allowed to bring in their families unless they first prove that they have "at their disposal housing considered normal for a comparable family living in France" (Scullion 1995:39, cited from Rosello 1997:242).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Casualties of Care by Miriam Ticktin. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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