Mr. Idipro and all participants,
By future, I mean being a French citizen with all the rights, privileges and duties that citizenship places on you. By citizenship, I mean the right to participate fully, adroitly, and legally in the social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual life of the country where you are a citizen by birth or by the legal processes legislated by the state.
To further define this term future, we have to look at it via three lenses-one lens is that of the first generation immigrants, the other is the lens of the generations that issue from the presence of the first generation onward and the third is that of the dominant society. Failure in Africa is the principal reason why there is a massive immigration to France and her sister countries in Europe. How many are legal residents? How many are citizens? How many have received technical and professional training? How many are living in decent houses, decent apartments, in short, decent residences? How many can return home to engage in decent work that can promise them prosperity? When worse comes to worst, what are the chances that the French authorities will tolerate them and let them stay to benefit from social welfare?
Now look at the second generation onward. They are born in France, so they are naturally French citizens by right of birth according to French law if I have understood what I have read. Now my friends, how many of these young immigrant children will do well in school to learn enough of the French culture and society to excel in it? These are generations caught in the middle, between their African parents' cultures and the larger French society. By future, I also mean social, political, and economic integration. How many of the children issuing from immigrant marriages will learn enough, know enough to push their way and be fully integrated in French society? Is integration what they really want? Or do they wish for a a separate culture, a separate society within the larger French society, that is, a society within a society? Will the larger dominant society agree to this arrangement?
As you see, I am trying to develop a case for full integration in French Society either as a minority culture and society (but a minority group that is in harmony with the larger French society because it knows it very well and is respectful of its mores as the larger society is aware of the immigrant society's mores and is also equally respectful of them) or as a fully integrated minority group that is fully assimilated.
Is there a future for a fully integrated minority group in a France and by extension a Europe that no longer needs its colonial dependents? Will the French co-exist with a different people with strange cultures like polygamy when the economic condition which made their presence tolerable is no longer there?
In short, the real question is will France remain home for the descendants of immigrants from the colonies when such people are longer needed and they are by and large a drain on the national coffers?
Now can you see future as a meaning a home for the descendants of the immigrants no matter what happens to the European economy? Take home in its broadest sense: citizenship with inviolable rights, duties, privileges, and a deep sense of ease and a sense of security.
I have spent some four years in Europe with a stretch of time in France before heading to the USA. I have studied this question closely in the USA. Here too, it is assimilation into the larger White American society or separate and inferior existence at the fringes of society. In my mind, the problem is not different in France. The descendants of immigrants face a similar problem-integration or marginalization. Political activism in the USA led to a certain degree of tolerance for integration for those who have met the conditions to join White Middle Society. My observation is that this is not where you will find the majority of the descendants of the our Black cousins. It is not different in France when I was there. The bright and talented ones always escape. And the rest? Aren't they citizens by law? Isn't this law not made by Man? If so, can't Man repeal the law that has made you a citizen and drive you out? Isn't this the far right's political agenda?
Think on this?