France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy and Canada’s prime Minister Stephen Harper have benefitted from exploiting popular prejudices about immigrants.
When approval ratings are low, some leaders rethink their strategies, come up with practical solutions, and connect with the populace. Others with less integrity seek an easy scapegoat: often in the form of foreigners.
The Roma people, pejoratively known as “gypsies,” are Europe’s largest minority. Somewhere between 500,000 to a million live in France, mostly coming from Eastern Europe. Many live in encampments: cramped lots on the periphery of cities filled with scores of mobile homes. Poverty, disease, and crime run rampant among the squatters.
Long the pariahs of Europe, discrimination of Romani people is well-documented throughout the continent. Historically known as a nomadic people, their wandering has never ceased as European societies continue to stigmatize and deny the continent’s roughly 11 million Roma rightful education and social services.
Five years into the Decade of Roma Inclusion, an initiative backed with $17 billion in EU funding, many remain illiterate and unemployed. A sizable number roam city streets, peddling babies and begging passersby for spare change. Tourists are often pick-pocketed, conned, and sometimes, jumped.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government has been extraditing Romani to their countries of origin for the past year. But the effort has recently been stepped up.
Facing abysmal approval ratings halfway through his term, Sarkozy has been dealing with a rising deficit, staggering growth and a party funding scandal. This year he’s orchestrated unnecessary polemics, with a burqa ban and town hall-style debates on national identity, to distract the electorate and gain the support of France’s extreme right-wing factions.
But the distraction hasn’t been enough. His plans for EU austerity measures are meeting hostile opposition. The French blogosphere is swarming with rumours of violent uprisings on Labour Day resembling the 2005 and 2007 riots—both of which included scores of torched cars and civilians opening fire on police.
Two weeks ago, Sarkozy started an aggressive campaign of Roma deportation. Feeding off prejudice and fear, he’s linked immigration to crime and has begun a program of “voluntary repatriation” for supposed illegal migrants. Adults are offered 300 euros and a seat on a flight to Romania or Bulgaria.
The move has been condemned by both the UN and the Vatican. The EU has questioned the legality of the expulsions, noting that its open-border policies make claims of illegal immigrants difficult to prove.
It gets uglier. Sarkozy even threatened to withdraw citizenship from immigrants convicted of endangering police. The last time French citizenship was revoked from naturalized foreigners was in the 1940s, when Pétain’s fascist-collaborative government expatriated Jews to get them into Auschwitz-bound trains faster.
Similar scapegoating has also taken place in Canada. Last October, the Ocean Lady docked at Victoria, B.C. with 76 Tamil men aboard. All were released after the Canada Border Services Agency found no evidence of terrorist connections. The event provoked some debate and editorials, but faded from prominence within days.
Since then, Harper’s government has been plagued by scandal: the Afghanistan torture allegations, the long-form census, building more prisons for “unreported crime,” the G20 in general.
The second boat of Tamil migrants couldn’t have chosen a worse time to arrive.
We were we told that these people were aliens jumping the queue and feeding off our tax system, that the Tamil Tigers are establishing a government in exile and sending more boats.
As the boat came closer, our collective intelligence was increasingly insulted. We were hysterically warned of terrorists on board. Rejecting the concept of innocence until proven guilty, the Conservatives still continue to spread these unsubstantiated allegations.
Not only does this slander those involved, it undermines the trust the public places in their government. The danger in throwing around terrorism allegations is that it opens the door to a boy-cried-wolf situation.
Harper’s efforts have largely been successful. With weak media seeking the latest sensationalized story, the Conservatives have gained support from tough-on-crime voters and the pesky Afghan torture scandal is far off the radar.
Terrorism means using fear to coerce. It seems this is exactly Harper and Sarkozy’s approach to public debate.
The Tamil migrants deserve the fair process afforded to all claiming refugee status. The Roma in France deserve concrete moves to help them assimilate into society. The Canadian and French electorates deserve governments that don’t steep to scapegoating when faced with tough questions.
While the Tamil migrant situation is less elaborate than the French expulsion of Roma people, it sets a shared and dangerous precedent. Using xenophobia as a political tool is dangerous, cowardly, and undermines democracy. I trust Canadians will be smart and courageous enough to see past the fear-mongering and focus on getting answers to our real questions.
