Immigrants - How Sarkozy is Dealing With Them

We’ve all got immigration stories. My youngest son bought his first house in a slightly shabby area of Glasgow only to find that the place went totally downhill when the council turned a housing estate across from his very presentable flat into an immigration and asylum seekers enclave. Within months, the longer-established residents whose houses faced the estate, re-christened the area, Bosnia! The place was a complete tip. Tim did well to sell when he did.

My brother (Robert) lives in a nice area just to the west of Glasgow, but once again instead of tearing down the no longer desirable high-rise flats located half a mile from his house, the council have filled them with asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be heard. That’s ok, but the pond populated with beautiful, elegant swans, no more than 200 yards from his house, is no more. Well, the pond is still there but the swans are not – guess where they’ve gone? And when they disappear, they seem to do so at the dead of night!

Now down here in the south of France, things are slightly different – there are quite a few Moroccan and Algerian  immigrants in the local area but generally there is work for them with no shortage of villas going up requiring their excellent building skills. The Polish people are terrific carpenters and true to their race characteristics, are terrifically hard workers. If building work dries up, they will paint or do gardening.

But things are different in Marseille. There, Sarkozy’s storm-troopers are rounding up Roma immigrants (gypsies) and are turfing them out of France using a law which maybe the UK should consider. The law says, that despite the fact that, in many cases, their countries of origin, e.g. Romania and Bulgaria, are members of the EEC, the Roma immigrants can be sent home if they do not have ‘adequate means or resources to support themselves’. My god, if the UK authorities adopted this type of legal requirement, the population would fall by several million!

But back to Marseille. When I was there a few years ago, I got lost in my car and ended up in an area where the first thing you did was to lock your doors and hope that you didn’t break down. It was like the ‘Bosnia’ area of Glasgow I described earlier, but far closer to the elegant centre of that great Mediterranean city. It was crying out for a clean-up and it seems that Sarkozy has finally got around to it.

Good or bad, the Romas (and it’s not a targeted programme aimed at these EEC citizens, it’s just that they have formed an enclave within a slum), are being rounded up if they have no jobs or work papers are being ‘repatriated’ back to their home countries, no doubt on nice scheduled aircraft and with €300 in their pocket. The problem is, being EEC citizens, they simply spend their €300 in their homeland and then hop on the next lorry heading south and hey-presto, they’re back in Marseille!