Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Camus’s nostalgia is for an old France that he finds in the coastal provinces of the southwest, where there are apparently no housing projects plagued by unemployment and delinquency but only “old round fortified villages with narrow streets and houses clinging to each other.”9 It is this same nostalgic vision that inspires all of the new right’s intellectual beacons, from the hard-edged white supremacists like Raspail, whose hero lives in a stone house in just such a coastal village, to the less aggressive purveyors of nostalgia like Finkielkraut, with his paeans to the cows of Normandy.

  In Calais, the activists complain, nothing changes. “Everyone says one more year, and it gets worse. It takes a major event for the public to react,” says Pascal, as he tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped, and killed by a Polish immigrant.

  But the leaders of Retake Calais don’t have much of a problem with Eastern Europeans. “We had Poles and Spanish and Italians. They totally integrated.” By contrast, they point to the town of Roubaix, just outside Lille, which has a large Muslim population. “It’s mind-blowing. Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Turks. It’s an African city in France. It’s horrible. They don’t come to integrate. They come for health care and a nice house.”

  For Samuel, the core issue is religion, even though he confides he’s not observant himself. “I know an Algerian guy. He’s as French as I am. He eats pork. He’s not Muslim. He celebrates Christmas and Easter. He baptized his kids at the church.” In fact, he adds, the Algerian guy hates Moroccans. “When he speaks, he’s more racist than I am!” Samuel adds with a chuckle. But, he says, “a person like that is one in a thousand.”

  They also have no time for the local press, which published articles labeling their organization and similar ones like Calaisiens en Colère (Angry Calaisiens) xenophobic and fascist. “If defending one’s country makes you a fascist, then I’m a fascist,” Samuel declares.10

  Dr. Bagdouche believes that a movement is beginning to coalesce. Groups like Retake Calais and Angry Calaisiens exist within this ecosystem. He respects the anger of neighbours suddenly surrounded by thousands of refugees. These are “people who are not millionaires. I can understand.”

  The problem, he contends, is that government decisions “have set up the perfect conditions for conflict” with little effort to defuse tensions. They allowed the camp to grow without trying to negotiate with the refugees or explaining the crisis to the local population. And there was little effort to build bridges. Essentially, they said, “Get along.” He points to the FN’s win with close to 50 percent in the first round of the 2015 regional elections and with even better numbers in Calais. The situation, he says gravely, has become “ultrasensitive politically.”

  Bagdouche has been targeted before. His work has taken him to places like Afghanistan and Libya. He was not expecting to be harassed two hours from Paris. Abroad, he says, “we are targeted because we are French.” In Calais, there is something different happening. It is one of the poorest regions in France, but that is hardly on the agenda. “We are not talking about the economic problems of this region at all.” Bagdouche credits the FN with diverting attention or redirecting anger from the causes of economic problems to an easily identifiable scapegoat. “They won somewhere because they managed to move the cursor away from the problem, except that by moving it, they created a real political and global problem.”

  He views France’s antipathy toward Arabs as rooted in the colonial past. “All that is Arab is a problem for the French,” he contends. And this animosity has been easily mobilized into what he sees as a sort of “territorial vigilance” that attracts those in the police and military and others who are opposed to immigration.

  The message is straight out of the great replacement, that “the barbarians must not occupy our country” or colonize France. It also resonates “somewhere beyond the law,” he says, which encourages vigilante violence. There are alliances, he says. A retired general from the Foreign Legion who lives on the other side of France doesn’t just show up at a protest in Calais “on a Sunday simply because he has nothing to do,” says Bagdouche. He helped legitimize the movement, making other activists and protesters see themselves as soldiers with a role to play—part of the chain of command.

  Bagdouche worries that the historical forces at work won’t disappear or be stopped easily. “One does not prevent a historical movement like this one. We cannot prevent it.” When Qaddafi was still in power in Libya, the country served as a barrier between Africa and Europe. That’s no longer the case.

  “I was in Libya, in Egypt. I know the mentality, the culture. There is no one who will stop the refugees,” he says. And these days the people coming aren’t Malians and Senegalese seeking a better life for the most part. It is people fleeing from decades of war. “They have decided to go to Europe, they will go there. They will not be afraid,” he insists. “They simply do not want to stay in a country that is at war.”

  He finds the right’s popular refrain that true patriots stay home to defend their country naive and childish. “Defend it against whom?” asks Bagdouche. Against Assad? Against the Russians? Against the Americans? Against ISIS? “This is not France against Germany. We’re past that.… We’re not on a Maginot line.”11

  Today, Europe’s most heavily fortified border is just down the street. The Calais ferry terminal, the primary transit point for holidaying Brits taking their cars to the Continent, lies behind layers of tall steel fences and coiled barbed wire. It is only a fifteen-minute walk from the Jungle, and groups of migrants often pass by on the road leading to the departures area. There are few ways in; police patrol the entrances and exits, and even the departure ramp leading to the road for the few disembarking passengers who want to walk 1.5 miles into the centre of town is enclosed in heavy mesh wire.

  It’s here that I meet Rudy Vercucque and Yohann Faviere, the local leaders of the Front National. Both men are anxious as they await a meeting with a visiting European Union official from Brussels. They insist on talking outside in front of the ferry terminal. Giant seagulls circle and squawk above.

  More than anyone else, their ire is directed at the mayor of Calais, a member of Les Républicains. “She made the land for the camp available. It’s she who has permitted this,” Vercucque, a portly thirty-six-year-old, belts out angrily. And it was the former president, Sarkozy, he reminds me, who negotiated the notorious Le Touquet accords, effectively moving the British border to where we are standing. “He has made Calais the cul-de-sac of immigration in France.”

  Faviere, bespectacled and bearded, is more soft-spoken. “I’m from here, and what we’re doing today is trying to defend our city,” he explains. He has few kind words for Sarkozy. “Sarkozy says he’ll send the police, but you can’t forget that it was he who eliminated thousands of police jobs in France. It’s they who are responsible,” he says, blaming the former president. “And to think that if they’re reelected they’ll change things, that’s not possible.”

  After taking a call in the parking lot, Vercucque rejoins us on the rainy pavement outside the ferry terminal. “Today, you have weapons circulating in the Jungle, you have prostitution rings,” he claims with alarm. “There’s no tourism. Why? Because there have been riots in the centre of town.” As a result, the businesses of Calais are suffering. They pay their taxes,” he assures me. “In the Jungle, the people don’t pay taxes. Take a regular French guy who wants to make a bit of money for the end of the month. He opens a chip shop without declaring himself to the authorities—that would last two days. There it’s been going on for months.”

  Revenues for businesses in central Calais are down 40 percent, including over the summer when tourism from Britain peaks.12 The mayor, he asserts, “has no plan.” The result is chaos, economic malaise, and a stagnating economy. “Find a doctor who wants to move to Calais. Find a surgeon who wants to move to Calais. If you bought your house for 250,000 euros, now with what’s happened, you’ll lose between 40,000 an
d 60,000! How are you going to sell?” he exclaims. “Can you imagine? You work your whole life, you pay off your house, and you lose money. It’s not tolerable.”

  He mentions the case of Nadine Guerlach, who was threatened with expulsion from the house she’d lived in for decades, a council flat that directly borders the camp and who made a series of YouTube videos (with the aid of Samuel and Pascal from Retake Calais) lamenting the lost world of her youth when the Jungle was just a sandy expanse of dunes outside the city. She no longer leaves the house or does errands.

  “You let a migrant come and move here totally illegally, and a Calaisienne who has paid her rent for thirty years, and now they want to kick her out because the house belongs to the municipality?” he asks, incredulously. “I don’t think that’s normal.” He makes fun of the mayor’s pleas for aid from the central government in Paris just before the last local election. “She’s created a situation that she can’t control anymore, and now she’s playing victim because she can’t accept the fact that it is her fault.” Vercucque is suspicious that most of the migrants are not genuine refugees. He cites a census that showed 6,000 migrants and only 115 women and children among them. “If your country is at war or a boat is sinking, you send the women and children first,” he tells me. “Are these really war refugees? I don’t think so.”

  With all this anger directed at the current government, I ask if the FN’s voter base is coming to them out of rage. The ever-diplomatic Faviere explains, “I don’t think it’s a vote of anger or a protest vote. I think today we really have people who adhere to our ideas … and that people really agree with us.”

  Vercucque puts it more bluntly. “We say out loud what people think deep down,” he declares. “And now they’re realizing that we’re right.”13

  Thirty miles away, in the small town of Grande-Synthe on the outskirts of Dunkirk, a “second Calais” has sprouted, but under very different circumstances.

  Grande-Synthe is a tiny, orderly town. It was built on the edges of Dunkirk to provide housing for the workers toiling in the nearby factories. It is much smaller than Calais, and everyone in the city hall seems to know one another. The town centre is sleepy, with just a few shops, a brasserie, and a parking lot. The roundabouts are well manicured, and the street names tend toward the political, with some named after Socialist heroes like the slain Chilean president Salvador Allende. Grande-Synthe’s residents have elected and reelected a Green Party mayor, Damien Carême, for the past sixteen years. It is also the first town in France to build a refugee camp voluntarily on its territory. “I told the government I would not accept deaths in my municipality,” Carême tells me.

  It is unusual for an area where the FN is gaining popularity. Carême proudly tells me that when Marine Le Pen was running in the 2015 regional elections, the FN only got 41 percent in his town, the lowest in the region—an area where Le Pen won a convincing 53 percent majority in the 2017 election.14 Carême says there is no organized FN presence in the town and no committed activists for the party, although many have voted for it. He has still managed to win with comfortable margins for over a decade, winning an outright majority in the first round of the mayoral election with well over 50 percent of the vote.

  Some of the town’s politics can be explained by its history; Grande-Synthe was once an agricultural area. In the 1950s, it was a village, and residents used to walk across the fields to the seashore. ArcelorMittal, a steel giant, built a plant on the shore in 1963 with railroad tracks, new roads, and a huge dock for big ships transporting the steel. “It was a decision by the state to bring in factory workers,” says Carême, including his father, who came from eastern France. “We came because there was work here,” he recalls. Others came from Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Poles who had worked as miners in northern France came looking for work after the mines shut down. There were also workers from North Africa, recruited by French companies because they needed labour.

  Grande-Synthe quickly transformed into a company town, and the population exploded, creating demand for more housing for all the new factory workers. In the span of less than twenty years, it grew from a village of 1,800 to a town of more than 20,000.

  The influx of refugees did not become grave until 2015. There were only thirty refugees in 2006, recalls Carême. “They stayed one night near the service stations and then jumped into trucks.” As the numbers climbed, the municipality provided a heated tent and later multiple ones for men and women. Still the migrants tended to stay for forty-eight hours maximum. Their goal was always to reach England.

  In the autumn of 2015, the numbers skyrocketed as more than a million Syrian refugees and other migrants made their way across Europe. The population of the camp went from 60 in July to 190 in August, then 550 in September. By October, there were 1,200 people, including many children. By the end of the year, there were 2,800 people living in increasingly unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. The bottleneck grew because the migrants all wanted to go to the United Kingdom, and border security, managed by the French police, was tight.

  In August, Carême contacted the interior ministry, saying he wanted to take care of the people in his town. Initially, top officials in Paris were not enthusiastic and tried to dissuade him. They feared attracting more migrants and smuggling networks. “But I said I can’t leave them in the conditions they’re living in today. It’s inhumane. I won’t stand for it. There were three hundred children.”

  The growing camp, however, was on land that had been zoned for a new housing development. “I didn’t know when it would stop. I needed to get the land back because I was planning to build housing on it,” he adds, showing me satellite photos of the area. Moreover, local residents, their own immigrant heritage notwithstanding, were beginning to get irritated by the constant stream of volunteers from across Europe arriving with food, tents, and mattresses. “And the cops were there constantly. It was a huge mess. Residents were afraid that it would become like Calais,” recalls Carême. “I told them I’d do something about it.”15

  In the summer of 2016, the new camp in Grande-Synthe sprawled between a railway and a six-lane motorway overpass on the edge of town. An old factory building loomed over the entrance; it was painted pale blue, and almost all the windows were broken.

  When I visited, the camp was a collection of 367 small wooden structures scattered across a barren gravel expanse between the highway and the tracks. Each wooden shack was heated by a small gas stove. They were more durable than the plastic-and-cardboard homes forty miles away in the Calais Jungle but far from comfortable.

  There weren’t many people out, probably owing to Ramadan. Of the one thousand registered residents, I only encountered about twenty people, mostly young men in T-shirts and sweatpants walking to the bathrooms or the camp’s phone charging station, where a few teenagers were playing foosball. Two young children rode dirt bikes up and down the gravel path. An elegant older man in a three-piece suit and Ray-Bans rushed from one shack to another, holding his veiled wife’s hand.

  According to the mayor’s office, over 80 percent of the residents in June 2016 had come from Kurdish areas of Syria; prior to that, most were Iraqi Kurds. Graffiti advocating Kurdish independence adorned the walls of most of the shacks, and Kurdish flags were everywhere. The municipal government had posted red warning signs all over the camp with pictures of the highway, train tracks, and overhead power lines and the macabre message “Beware: Do Not Add to Recent Deaths,” a reminder that most people do not intend to stay and their attempts to reach Britain generally involve crossing either the six-lane motorway or the railway.

  Unlike Calais, where political opposition to refugees has been loud and occasionally violent, there was little reaction in Grande-Synthe. “My constituents have always been admirable on this issue,” says Carême. There were no protests or petitions. He began writing monthly letters to constituents outlining his plans and the costs and reassuring them the original camp would be moved. “I told them there are new
immigrants arriving here because there’s war in their homelands and terrorism.” Then he enlisted MSF to help advise on the relocation and design the new camp.

  Carême believes that most politicians are driven to the right out of fear, telling themselves that support for the FN will increase if they don’t act harshly. But that sort of electoral fear ends up entrenching far-right policies, whether or not the FN wins. Doing nothing amounts to “putting in place the policy of the Front National,” Carême insists. “And for me, that’s not how you fight them.”

  As for the right’s claim that allowing migrants to stay encourages smuggling, he is dismissive. “Ten days ago, we arrested a major smuggler who’d come from Germany, so our fight against smuggling is working. We stopped twenty-two smuggling networks here. That hasn’t happened in Calais, because we work with the police and the courts.” Eventually, the national government came and paid for the day-to-day functioning of the camp. “They wrote a check. They saw that it worked. They announced that Paris is going to build one now like ours.”

  At the beginning, recalls Carême, “everyone said, ‘He’s crazy. He’s going to have problems.’” The key, he is adamant, is keeping it within manageable proportions. “There were 2,800 refugees; I have a population of 22,000,” an additional population of almost 15 percent to absorb and support in a small town. “It’s a temporary solution. We responded to a need at a given moment,” he says.

  The closing down of Calais led to growth in Grande-Synthe. In April 2017, most of the camp was reduced to ashes after fires broke out, following fights between Kurds and Afghans, and most of its residents left for asylum-seeker centres across the country. Whether or not Carême rebuilds the camp, he’s convinced that those who came to his town are only a first wave. “I think we’re going to have climate refugees by the millions,” the mayor adds, referring to those fleeing islands and low-lying coastal areas in countries like Bangladesh or drought in the Middle East. “We need to prepare for that.”16