The new immigration measures affect the peoples to whom the French once exported their culture and politics, as well as their goods, their missionaries and army units to maintain order in the colonies. But suddenly Africans, Arabs and Asians of modest means who thought they had been granted access to a world culture find they are greeted with suspicion or even hostility if they seek to work in or visit France. The xenophobic National Front political party of Jean-Marie Le Pen promises to expel the estimated 3 million legal and illegal immigrants who have established homes in France, and open up 3 million jobs for French citizens. The National Front recently captured its fourth city hall in southern France, and President Jacques Chirac's conservative majority in the National Assembly fears the far right will take seats from it in next year's parliamentary balloting. To preempt Le Pen, the government introduced legislation in parliament giving the police greater powers to look for and detain unregistered aliens.
Polls show the legislation is broadly popular.
Most of the controversy and protests have centered on one incredibly insensitive clause that would have required French hosts of foreign visitors to file reports with the police when the foreigners left the hosts' homes. That carried unacceptable echoes of France's collaborationist past in World War II, when French Jews were reported to Nazi authorities for deportation to death camps. The government quickly modified the clause to eliminate the informer requirement. France's conscience is uneasy, about the Vichy era and about what it proposes to do to its former colonial wards, who made significant contributions to building the modern French economy. But the French dilemma is in fact only an exposed cutting edge of a problem faced by other industrial democracies that have become magnets for immigrant workers and families in this era of global communications, easy travel, and easy trade and capital movement.