Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [120]
The response of Nicolas Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time of the riots and built his presidential bid on his tough response to the car burnings, was to impose extra policing and attempt to restrict immigration, on the basis, he argued, that such village-based immigrants are fundamentally unassimilable.7 Yet the experience of tens of thousands of other French Africans who have made good livelihoods outside of France belies this claim. The European arrival city is not a homogenous place; the continent contains some of the world’s most effective and flourishing rural-arrival neighborhoods. Even within Paris, the inner-city quarter of Belleville—the sort of place that was demolished or abandoned to build the banlieues—is studied today as a place of entrepreneurship-driven advancement, with its prosperous and self-supporting mix of North and sub-Saharan Africans, east Europeans and Asians, and its transition to middle-class success.8
France’s arrival cities are not ethnic ghettos. Les Pyramides, a fairly typical example, has not only large numbers of Africans but also sizable populations of Indians, Sri Lankans, Turks, Egyptians, and eastern Europeans, as well as a good number of people like the white French woman, who grew up in a village in Brittany, who runs the Turkish café next door to Aziz’s shop. She doesn’t feel stuck. But a great many people here, from a dozen countries on three continents, have arrived from rural poverty and have found that their children are trapped halfway between the village and the city, with nowhere to move.
Something happens to villagers when they arrive in the French urban outskirts. The culture of transition, that fertile amalgam of village and urban life, is frozen in its early stages, prevented from advancing into permanency, from growing into something that contributes to the country’s economy and culture. The parents often manage the first stage adequately, keeping one foot in the village and one in the city, holding down rudimentary jobs and supporting their villages through remittances. But they are prevented from moving to the usual next stage, from launching any kind of small business, from owning their house, from meshing themselves with the larger urban community—they remain isolated. And their children, fully acculturated, find themselves stuck—in part by a well-documented racism that denies them jobs or higher-education postings on the basis of last names or postal codes.9 But behind that “post-code racism” is the reality of those locations: Because of the physical nature of the banlieue and the organization of its institutions, the villagers have no means to move to the next stage. This is often mischaracterized as a clash of civilizations or a failure of assimilation; it is better understood as an arrested rural–urban transition.
“The problem is that these kids are made to see themselves as immigrants,” Aziz told me. “France wants them, it needs people who can do this kind of cleaning and building work. And they end up stuck in Les Pyramides, because it’s the place where they’re made to go. And their kids have nothing. They were born here, they speak the language perfectly, they can work. But they don’t have work. They didn’t build Les Pyramides with Africans in mind. There are not enough rooms, no place for markets, nothing that people from villages can use to make a start—it’s architecturally very beautiful, I think, but the problem is that it’s not being respected by the young people here. They turn against it and they turn against the police and the government and now even people like me.”
Two towers over, a proud French air force veteran named Badiane Babikan, born in a small village 15 kilometres from Dakar but educated in the great cities of Africa and France, spoke to me with even deeper frustration about the families who form the majority of Africans in Les Pyramides.
“These villagers are as