Macron's Hard Line on Illegal Immigrants

The news comes to us from the Associated Press via Powerline and via Maggie’s Farm.

French president Emmanuel Macron is adopting a hard line on illegal immigration. Considering that Macron worked for socialist president Francois Hollande and that he defeated notoriously anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen, his actions merit attention. At the least, he is putting an end to the idea that France is a sanctuary country.

The AP lays it out:

From snowy Alpine passes to the borders with Spain or Germany, migrants keep making their way to France. In Paris alone, police have evacuated around 30,000 people camping on sidewalks in the last two years.

No one doubts that France’s system of dealing with migrants needs fixing, with a perennial housing shortage and long wait times in applying for asylum.

“Living in the street. Living in a tent. Sometimes you get food. Sometimes you not get food,” said Samsoor Rasooli, a 25-year-old Afghan standing in line since 6 a.m. to apply for asylum at a Paris facility, where some spend the night on the sidewalk, strewn with filth, to keep their place. The door closed at mid-day, the 100 places allotted that day for applicants filled.

“It’s winter. I can’t sleep in the street,” Rasooli said.

Asylum opens the way for temporary housing, but only one-third of the 95,000 applicants this year were accepted, government officials say.

The government will try to change immigration policy legislatively:

A bill overhauling asylum and immigration policy will be debated in the spring, notably expediting asylum demands but also doubling to 90 days the time a person without papers can be held in a holding center, the last step before expulsion — an approach the government says is “balanced” and “efficient.”

Macron is refusing to accept economic migrants and is expelling more illegals:

Macron has made clear he wouldn’t accept economic migrants in France, wants those who don’t qualify for asylum expelled and doesn’t want them even trying to come to France.

The French president has been rolling out a multi-pronged approach that stretches to Africa, with points set up in Chad and Niger to pre-select those certain of gaining asylum — and weed out potential economic migrants.

At home, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb has ordered prefects, regional representatives of the state, to crack down on illegal immigration, “act quickly” to expel those who fail to gain asylum and report results within weeks, according to a November order cited by the newspaper Le Monde.

A newer set of orders in December rang alarm bells. Collomb told regional authorities to set up “mobile teams” to run checks in emergency housing to ascertain the status of migrants. Emergency shelters are considered bedrocks of the French tradition of open arms to those in need and have long been considered untouchable, even by security authorities.

Apparently, the French government had practiced an “open arms” policy even before German Chancellor Merkel did. Now, the arms are being closed and authorities are ramping up their searches for illegals.

Macron has also ordered that encampments of illegals in Paris streets and elsewhere be cleared:

A camp of about 40 Afghan migrants was dismantled last week in the Pas-de-Calais region in northern France, and another was taken down in Macon in the east. On Thursday, a camp on the banks of the Seine river was the latest in Paris to be bulldozed, with 131 migrants taken to shelters.

Police staked out a tollbooth north of Paris in an operation against the “migrant flux,” stopping car after car to check for migrants who don’t have residency documents.

Of course, some politicians have rebelled. But since Macron is a center left politician, and has the support of the political right… the opposition can do very little:

Patrick Weil, among France’s leading immigration specialists, said Macron “tweets about human rights and refugees during the day and at night gives the opposite orders.”

Weil contended on BFM-TV that Macron’s approach is “the most extreme we’ve had since the war.”

It’s coated “with a smile, with bonbons, but in practice it’s a dagger,” he said.

Could it be that Macron is taking his inspiration from President Trump, and not from President Obama. We understand that Angela Merkel was practicing the Obama citizen-of-the-world, open borders politics. Now, Macron, who presided over last July’s Bastille Day celebration with Donald Trump at his side, has taken a different tack.

One notes with amusement that America's foreign policy elite is bemoaning the fact that Donald Trump has caused American influence in the world to decline. True, Obama is still the most popular American president around the world—obviously, the peoples of the world were happy to watch Obama diminish the USA while elevating the prestige of everyone else. 

And yet, from Paris to Riyadh to Beijing, Donald Trump has been treated with more respect than the hapless Obama. Go figure.