Among other things, this would involve cutting social benefits paid to immigrants, legal or otherwise. Balladur, at the head of the government under Mitterrand in 1993-95, is to the right of centre in French political terms, but part of the political establishment that affects to disdain Le Pen as a crude racist thug. Balladur's attempt to reduce the distance between himself and FN on this issue therefore came as a shock to many. Brought before the National Assembly in December, passing it took 13 days, savage procedural battles and nearly 1,800 attempted amendments. High-profile mass expulsions are no longer the rule, in contrast to Pasqua's policy of chartering planes and forcing arrested immigrants from West Africa onto them to be flown home handcuffed to policemen and often drugged to overcome their resistance.
Deportation is in any case a notoriously unreliable weapon.
Even at the height of the charter era in the early 1990s, no more than 12,000 illegal foreigners were expelled in any one year. Pressure groups fighting the immigrant issue, such as Ras l'Front and SOS-Racisme, remain highly critical of the government. They are well capable of giving Jospin headaches if mass deportations resume. But they will get little more sympathy among the population at large than do hunger-striking immigrants in Lyons and elsewhere. A Paris-based immigration consultant Charles Condamines points out that aid flows to Africa do not target the sources of problem migration.