Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France - Softcover

Raissiguier, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804757623 ISBN 13: 9780804757621

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Early one morning in 1996, the sanctuary of a Parisian church was suddenly disrupted by a police raid. A group of undocumented immigrant families had taken refuge in the church under threat of deportation due to the French state's increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Rather than disperse and hide, these sans-papiers-people literally without papers- came together to bring to light the deep contradictions in the French state's immigration policies and practices.

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.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Catherine Raissiguier is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Becoming Women/Becoming Workers: Identity Formation in a French High School (1994).

Catherine Raissiguier is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Becoming Women/Becoming Workers: Identity Formation in a French High School (1994).

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Reinventing the Republic

GENDER, MIGRATION, AND CITIZENSHIP IN FRANCEBy Catherine Raissiguier

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5762-1

Contents

List of Figures......................................................................ixPreface..............................................................................xiAcknowledgments......................................................................xvIntroduction: Taking On the Republic.................................................11 Sans-Papiers: People and Movements.................................................142 Framing the Sans-Papires..........................................................323 The Legal Construction of Immigrant Women in France................................544 Family Matters: Immigration, Demography, and National Politics.....................725 Of Polish Plumbers and Senegalese Cleaning Ladies..................................916 Nanas, Pds, Immigrs: Solidarit?................................................112Conclusion...........................................................................129Appendix.............................................................................137Notes................................................................................141Bibliography.........................................................................173Index................................................................................185

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 Madjigune Ciss, 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 Zare 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 (rgularisation) 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 (dbouts 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 rgularisation 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-papires 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804757623
• ISBN 13: 9780804757621
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande