Foreigners in France

Paris.

The foreigner plays little part in the life of London, and for that reason the average Londoner is generally eager to know the few foreigners he meets. The reverse is the case in Paris. The newspaper kiosks alone tell their tale. Apart from French newspapers, the principal English, German, Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavian papers, I have observed on one stall half a dozen Armenian periodicals, as many Greek and Polish, four Hungarian, one Egyptian, one Persian, and some others of stranger script.

Police supervision of the foreigner has been slight until quite recently. There are probably still tens of thousands of foreigners in France who have never registered or taken out the papers which every foreign resident is supposed to possess. At the Surete Generale, M. Sarraut revealed six months ago, there was no central file of foreign residents and no competent translation service.

LABOR INVITED IN AFTER THE WAR

After the War foreign labor was encouraged to enter France to replace the 1,500,000 fallen Frenchmen in the work of postwar reconstruction and later to provide the necessary labor in factories and mines during the extraordinary period of post-reconstruction industrial expansion. When so many foreign workers were required, foreign political refugees, even if they came in the hundreds of thousands, as did the Russians (who probably number half a million) were easily absorbed.

Armenians, anti-Fascist Italians, republican Hungarians, Ukrainian nationalists, were all so many more hands for French cotton and steel mills, or at the coal face, so much more variety in the choice of exotic cooking in Paris restaurants, and so many more foreign papers to be handled by slightly puzzled and calmly disdainful French newspaper sellers.

Frenchmen have grown accustomed to employing foreigners for the heavier and more disagreeable forms of labor, such as coal hewing. Even certain skilled trades, such as building-joinery have been largely foreign.

EMPLOYMENT OF ALIEN HELP ROSE SHARPLY

Thus it was that the number of foreign employees (not counting wives and children, or foreign artists and professional men) rose from 530,000 in 1911 to 1,300,000 in 1931. How easily they could be absorbed in normal times is indicated by the surprising statistics of the Trades Union Federation, according to which, on the territory of pre-war France, the total number of employes, French and foreign, was 12,350,000 in the former year and sank to a little less than 12,000,000 in the latter.

When the economic crisis reached France, later than any other country in Western Europe, the nation suddenly woke up to the problem in its midst. The last wave of foreign immigrants, the German republicans and Jews, entered the country soon after France began to realize that she could not escape from the general depression.

Police supervision was rapidly increased; labor permits were refused or not renewed. Petty offenses brought expulsion orders in their train. Polish workmen who, after a number of years, were beginning to take their French surroundings for granted, found themselves compelled by unemployment to return to Poland, often with children who talked better French than Polish.

‘FRANCE FOR FRENCH ‘ BECAME BY-WORD

The number of foreign employes in France rapidly sank to a little over 800,000 (June, 1933) and has probably fallen further since. “Four hundred thousand French unemployed are receiving relief while 800,000 foreign employes are eating French bread” became a natural if facile political slogan.

Orders of expulsion have recently become ruthless and have indeed aroused indignant protests in many French newspapers. The hardest cases are those of the very numerous foreigners who have no longer any foreign homes to return to—Russians and Armenians, for instance.

Many Russian emigres in France who seemed to have established themselves anew, though in very moderate circumstances, have suddenly found the economic basis of their existence threatened again, and a further abyss of misery opening before them. A Russian who loses his job knows that he has only the remotest hope of finding another, and he has no legal claim to public relief. Tragic cases sometimes attract sufficient attention for French public opinion to be aroused.

WRITER TAKES UP CASE OF RUSSIANS

M. Francois Maurice, in a passionate article in the Figaro, declared that some Russians unable to leave France, because no other country will take them, have been condemned to prison as often as fifteen times for failure to comply with expulsion orders. Their only real offense in many cases was complete indigence. M. Maurice is far from being the only French champion of these unfortunates. In the Marseilles area French workmen have demonstrated to the verge of riot or behalf of Russian and Armenian mates who had been refused unemployment relief.

The situation is doubly tragic because France could certainly absorb these men in the long run. Indeed, they offer a valuable supplement to her depleted man power. The sudden return to their homes of hundreds of thousands of immigrants is indeed ruin for the shopkeepers and house owners in the neighborhoods in which they had settled.

The countryside is being abandoned in many parts of France by the native peasantry, who are going into the towns. Between 1921 and 1926, over 800,000 Frenchmen left the farm for the shop or factory, and it is thought that at least 300,000 more followed their example in the following years before the crisis put a stop to the movement.

PLENTY OF ROOM IN RURAL AREAS

There is, therefore, room and to spare in the country districts of France if some scheme of settlement could be organized. There is, however, neither scheme nor organization. The same French liberalism which made settlement so easy for the foreigner in the first case, which threw open the gates of France to the refugees, discourages constructive State action in this sphere.