UA criminal investigation opened on Wednesday March 22 by the Saint-Nazaire prosecutor’s office (Loire-Atlantique) is responsible for identifying the perpetrators of the fire which targeted, in the early morning, the home of Yannick Morez, mayor (without label ) of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, damaging the house of the elected official and destroying his two vehicles. But it is difficult not to link this event to the series of threats complained of for several weeks by this mayor who is in favor of the establishment by the State, in his municipality, of a reception center for asylum seekers ( CADA), and, more broadly, of the agitation organized by the extreme right aimed at opposing the creation of such structures and transforming the question of the integration of migrants into an “identity” battle.
The activists of Reconquête!, the party of Eric Zemmour, succeeded in January, through demonstrations, intimidation of elected officials and propaganda on social networks, to bring the municipality of Callac (Côtes-d’Armor) to to abandon its plan for the gradual settlement of refugee families. Since then, they have been trying to renew the operation. The commune of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, where a CADA is to be set up in disused premises near a school, has become one of the new targets of their campaign calling for “protect our children from migrants”.
Such amalgams, carriers of xenophobia, are inadmissible. Elected officials who defend the reception of asylum seekers or refugees must be protected, the laws repressing incitement to hatred, applied, the fears on which the extremists want to play, analyzed and dismantled. In reality, the reception of migrants in accommodation centers spread throughout the territory looks more like a quiet success than the chaos stirred up by “identitarians”.
The pragmatic way to a better distribution
If the cohabitation between foreigners – often single men – and the local population is not self-evident, many French municipalities, from Corrèze to Isère and from Puy-de-Dôme to Nièvre, have successfully , the challenge of hospitality and solidarity. Volunteers take part in French lessons, work integration sites operate, schools are repopulated and jobs are filled.
These policies must be supported by the State, responsible for implementing the right to asylum, and developed. The concentration of migrants in the big cities, where they are often condemned to abandonment for lack of accommodation, is one of the causes of the failures of integration. Municipalities, particularly rural ones, which combine vacant housing, schools threatened with closure and job opportunities are natural candidates for receiving small numbers of asylum seekers. Already, each month, nearly 2,000 people are, on pain of losing their asylum seeker’s allowance, “directed” to the regions, with the agreement of local elected officials.
Drowned in announcements on the immigration bill – now compromised by the political crisis – the words of Emmanuel Macron, in September, wishing for a better distribution of foreigners in the “rural areas which are losing population” had been castigated by the extreme right and criticized on the left. It is, however, the pragmatic way of the State distributing asylum seekers throughout the territory that France should resolutely take, like Germany, if it wants to multiply and trivialize the successful integration scenarios and marginalizing hatemongers.