DATE: 19/04/2011
AUTHOR: Steven Erlanger
VENTIMIGLIA, Italy — In the American Bar, across the square from the train station here, they have had enough. “The Tunisians are everywhere,” the waitress said. “It’s been like this for a month. They sleep in the station and on the streets, and we’ve lost a lot of customers.”
Mara Scasso, an emergency room nurse, said she had never seen so many police officers in this western edge of Italy, on the French border. “Helping the refugees is a moral duty,” she said. “But here we have one of the highest unemployment rates in Italy; it’s a dead zone. I don’t see how we can help them.”
Thirty yards away, about 70 young Tunisian men sat around the lip of a dry fountain in Piazza Battisti, drinking coffee, asking for money and giving interviews. Some of them have been sent between Italy and France several times, and the police and immigration officers carefully monitor the trains and stations on the Riviera tourist route between Nice, Menton and Ventimiglia, stopping every young man who looks Tunisian.These young men — there are no women — are a kind of Ping-Pong ball in a French-Italian political soap opera: economic migrants from a newly free but chaotic Tunisia who have dared the seas to find opportunity in a European Union that does not want them.
Italy has started issuing temporary six-month residence permits to Tunisians who arrived before April 5, saying that European Union rules under the Schengen treaty, which allows passport-free travel, would let them travel into France and elsewhere. The French are turning many of them back if they lack other documentation or sufficient money, or if they simply cannot satisfactorily explain, at least to officials, the nature and duration of their visit. As a French policeman in the Nice train station said of the permits, “The Italians have created a beautiful stupidity.”
But the Italians feel put upon, given their proximity to Tunisia and the arrival of some 25,700 Tunisian refugees this year, and they are worried about an even larger influx from Libya. They are asking for “European solidarity” from a European Union that has no uniform policy on economic migrants, refugees or even political asylum, and some Italian politicians have even threatened, idly, to quit the European Union if it does not help Italy with the influx. But the Italians are most angry with France, which is where most of the Tunisians say they want to go.
As Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told the daily La Repubblica: “The problem of immigration is becoming a bit like the nuclear issue. Everyone wants to say something about it, but no one wants it in their backyard.”
Mohamed Haddaji is a good example. In January, he paid about $2,100 to travel to Lampedusa, an Italian island near Tunisia, on a small boat. Single and 25, he worked in a Tunis bakery, but with the collapse of state authority he took his chance to go to France, where he has family, he said, to have a better life.
The Italian authorities are pleasant, he said; the French are not. “We sleep in the streets in France,” he said. He came with $1,400; he is decently dressed and has various phone cards in his wallet for Tunisia, Italy and France. Like his friend Jalel, 23, he says he wants to earn money and return to Tunisia.
But he has no papers, except for a card with his name and photograph from an Italian charity, and the French police told him to go back to Italy to get some. Even if he gets a six-month residency card and can show the French a valid train ticket from Italy, he may still get sent back, said Francis Lamy, the prefect of France’s Alpes-Maritimes department.
The French police have the right and duty, Mr. Lamy said in an interview in Nice, to ask a foreigner “to justify the reason for his visit and the duration, and to demonstrate the means to pay for this stay,” he said — usually $88 a day. “If the person acts suspicious or the answers are not satisfactory, the state can, under Schengen, send the person back, in this case to Italy, and Italy has an obligation to retake him.”
Mr. Lamy has told police officers under his command — as well as the 240 in three mobile units sent from Paris to help him deal with the Tunisians — “to follow the rules strictly.” Those rules, he said, along with a new French security law passed last month, allow officers within 12 miles of the border to stop people for identity and security checks if they are suspected of violating the law, crossing illegally or smuggling.
The police have arrested 100 human traffickers, Mr. Lamy said. In March alone, he said, French authorities arrested 2,800 foreigners, nearly all Tunisian, of whom 1,700 were expelled from France. Of those, 1,450 were returned to Italy, and some 250 were returned directly to Tunisia. There was not a single woman or application for political asylum, he said, insisting that each case is treated separately and with judicial oversight.
Just this week, said a worker for the state-financed legal aid group, Forum Réfugiés, Tunisians who first came to her for help a month ago had been told to return to Italy to get papers. When they re-enter France, even with the papers, they are sent back to Italy for not having enough money. “Normally to have an identity check, the police need suspicion of an infraction,” said the worker, Maud, who works in a state detention center in Nice and asked that her last name not be used. “Today there is racial profiling.”
There is significant political pressure on both sets of police from their governments, which loudly denounce illegal immigration and seem less than rigorous in applying European Union regulations that forbid racial profiling, though they deny it.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, unpopular in opinion polls, has taken a strong anti-immigrant stance, personified by his new interior minister, Claude Guéant, who says France also wants to cut legal immigration.
Italy’s coalition government gets support from the Northern League, which runs on an anti-immigration platform, while Mr. Sarkozy “has a similar problem” with the far-right National Front. “And in a moment when presidential elections are looming, he cannot afford to be seen as weak in immigration,” said Marta Dassu, director of Aspen Institute Italia, a research group.
A good example of the tensions and hyperbole over the issue erupted on Sunday, when the French prefect, Mr. Lamy, asked the state railway company to halt trains from Ventimiglia to France because of a planned demonstration supporting the Tunisians. He acted on his own, he said, because he had evidence from his Italian counterpart that the protesters, who had no permit to demonstrate and included a group of “possibly 50 violent activists,” presented “a serious risk to public order.”
Italy reacted angrily, sending its ambassador in Paris to protest what it said was a border closing in violation of European Union laws and principles. In the end, the disruption of train traffic lasted only several hours, and the European Union said France had acted correctly.
But the issue remains hot. Christian Estrosi, the deputy mayor of Nice and a legislator from Mr. Sarkozy’s party, said, “It is a little too easy for Italy to be generous with the territory of others.”
At the dry fountain in Ventimiglia, a young man named Ali was spinning tales about Tunisia, claiming to be the brother of the vegetable seller who immolated himself and set off the Tunisian revolution, and then asking for money. “The Europeans are racist,” he said angrily. “They don’t like the Arabs.”
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