France: The shadow of Vichy JEAN-MARIE LE PEN, leader of France's far right National Front, has recently published a fifty-point program on immigration.
In a France ruled by Le Pen, families of foreign workers would no longer have the right to automatically enter the country. Those born on French soil would not automatically be entitled to French citizenship - an imitation of the nationality code of the Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazis during World War Il. Those who have been granted French nationality in recent years would have their status retroactively reviewed - another practice borrowed from the Vichy years. Immigrants would be officially discriminated against in jobs, and a separate (and no doubt inferior) system of social security with separate funding would be established. Subsidies given to families based on the number of children they have would be reserved solely for French citizens. Citizens would be prioritized in the allocation of public housing. Those wishing to enter the country — even as tourists - would be required to post a 100,000 franc bond and undergo HIV blood testing. All of this would be enforced with the aid of detention centers established at airports and sea-ports
The NF also calls for a review of the French educational system in order to purge school curriculums of "cosmopolitanism". The construction of new mosques and Muslim cultural centers would be halted.
Not subject to these draconian measures would be people from other EEC (European Economic Community) countries and those sharing a common "destiny, culture, religion and civilization".
These measures were widely condemned by most of France's mainstream political parties and politicians on the right and left. But at least one well-known French politician, Michel Poniatowsk, a former Interior minister in the government of Valery Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970's, found many of these propositions "interesting" and "normal". Poniatowski has gone on record recently as favoring an eventual electoral alliance with the National Front. While the other right wing parties publicly refuse to consider such an eventuality, the logic of their public statements on immigration, such as Jacques Chirac's complaints about the "odors" of immigrants and Giscard d'Estaing's fear of an "invasion" ", leads precisely in that direction.