Strong Political Symbols on Both Sides of the Atlantic

 

On February 9, 2024, Robert Badinter died at the age of 95. In 2023, he published a book called “The Accusation,” a detailed account of the war crimes and crimes against humanity of Vladimir Putin. In 1981, as France’s Minister of Justice under President François Mitterrand, Badinter presented and defended a bill to abolish the death penalty, pushing it into law. Until that year, France’s guillotine was still in use.

Be it the abolition of the death penalty, rights for homosexuals, the territorial integrity of Ukraine, or the right to a sound defense for any man or woman accused of a crime, no matter how heinous, Robert Badinter fought for what he believed in. Though his name is probably unfamiliar to most Americans, he was honored as a “wise man” by President Macron at a public ceremony in Paris on February 14^th. His life and example represent a moral compass for many in France.

Robert Badinter lived an exceptional life in that he got to live it at all. His father emigrated to France in 1919 from what is today Moldavia, fleeing pogroms and revolution. He settled in Paris and became a successful businessman. His son Robert went to one of the best high schools in the city. The 1940 surrender of France to Germany put an end to that.

In 1942, Robert Badinter’s maternal grandmother died in deportation to Auschwitz. The family fled south to Lyon. During a raid of their apartment, Robert’s father was arrested and then deported. He died at Sobibor, a death camp at the Polish-Ukrainian border. Robert was not at home at the time of the raid. He, his brother Claude and his mother survived, passing the war years under false names in Chambéry, France.

Robert Badinter knew war and loss. He experienced injustice. He devoted his life to the fight for justice and equality for all French citizens, and he put his legal acumen to use to combat crimes against humanity, as in Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Until 2011, Robert Badinter served in the French Senate. After that, he continued as a lawyer in private practice and as a consultant to other jurists and to the French government.

 

At age 13, the very age when Badinter was fleeing the Nazis, Garbiel Attal, France’s current prime minister, was in the streets of Paris, protesting against the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate, on the ballot in the 2002 presidential elections. In 2006, Attal became a member of the French Socialist Party. In 2016, when Emmanuel Macron created “En marche” (On the move), a political party aspiring to transcend the boundaries of left and right, Gabriel Attal was among the first to step on board. In 2018, chosen as the government’s spokesperson during President Macron’s first term in office, he looked much younger than his 29 years.

On January 9^th of this year, Attal, age 34, was named France’s Prime Minister, the youngest in the Republic’s history. The President he serves, Emmanuel Macron, 39 at the beginning of his first term, is the youngest president in French history. Born in December 1977, the president is today 46 years old. 

In both 2017 and 2022, Emmanuel Macron’s opponent in presidential elections was Marine Le Pen (age 55), the daughter of Jean-Marie. 

 

 

Today, in a French Parliament with 577 members, where 10 different political parties are represented, the presidential party, renamed Renaissance in 2022, holds 169 seats. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) comes in second with 88. Upon taking up his post as Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal declared he was ready to “work with everyone.” This was not the case of his predecessor Elisabeth Borne, for whom the far-right RN and the far-left France Insoumise (Defiant France) flout the core values of the French Republic.

President Macron and his new prime minister will be fighting an uphill battle in the three remaining years of Macron’s tenure in office. Many of the problems they face will sound familiar to Americans: inflation, immigration, the Israeli-Hamas war, and the war in Ukraine, its capital Kiev as far from Paris as Kansas City from New York.

President Biden, age 81, has also been battling on many fronts and his approval ratings are low despite impressive accomplishments: his management of the end of the Covid pandemic, his infrastructure bill, the largest investment in public transport in US history, and his leadership role against Russian aggression in Ukraine. He has governed in a steady, sober manner that goes unrecognized by many Americans.

Perhaps it has something to do with age.

Symbols are what they are: something that stands for or suggests something else.

In France, the president, age 46, the new prime minister, age 34, and the current deputies of the National Assembly, median age, 49, represent vitality and youth when compared to the US government: President Biden, age 81; the Senate, median age 64; House of Representatives, median age, 58. I can’t help noticing, at least when it comes to politics, that the United States is getting old.

2016 portrait of Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, age 82 today

 

Again, symbols are what they are. They do not tell us whether France is better governed than the United States. They do seem to be telling us that, at the national level, older generations of American politicians are not making room for the new.

Another illustration of this is the upcoming presidential election of November 2024. I’ll say it point blank: the probable candidates are too old. President Biden, if elected, would be 86 at the end of a second term. Donald Trump would be 82. 

 

President Biden, from 1970 to the present, has led a life of public service to his country. Donald Trump, with no previous political experience before becoming president in 2018, has devoted most of his working life to real estate, entertainment and family businesses. Here too we could ask ourselves what each man symbolizes.

France’s “wise man” Robert Badinter, who remained an active and engaged citizen to the end, might say it’s time for both to step aside. In the case of President Biden, an able leader, not running could become the noble final act of a life of service. For Donald Trump, now is the time to lay personal revenge aside and return to the private sector he knows best. That’s what I call service to their country.   

            

         

 

Immigration: A Long Story!

 

In the 1850’s, there were already people named Honicker in the town of Saint Clair, PA. I imagine I’m descended from them because Saint Clair is my father’s hometown. Honicker is an unusual family name, but the majority of people who bear it reside in Pennsylvania. In the middle of the 19^th century, the original Honickers got on a boat and sailed from Germany to find work in the mines.

They came at a good time. A federal Immigration Bureau for processing and regulating immigration was not established until 1891, and only in 1917 was a literacy requirement put in place. The first truly restrictive immigration law targeting Europeans was not enacted until 1921, the Emergency Quota Act. Its main purpose was to keep people from Eastern and Southern Europe out.

In the 19^th century, immigrants from outside Europe, along with Native Americans, did not fare well. Already in 1803, in response to the Haitian Revolution, led by slaves who freed themselves and chased out the French, Congress banned immigration of free Blacks to the United States. They feared their presence would disrupt a flourishing slave trade.

In 1830, under President Jackson, the Indian Removal Act was passed. The US government confiscated the lands of Native Americans and forced their removal to west of the Mississippi. Considered as “nations,” they were not granted US citizenship. Not until 1924 and the passage of the American Citizenship Act, did Native Americans gain the 14^th Amendment right of automatic citizenship. 

 

On June 2, 1924 Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act

Conflict over immigration, foreigners, and new immigration laws are a constant of US history almost from the start. In 1790, Congress voted to limit naturalization to “free white men.” In 1882, the Chinese became the first group subjected to restrictive laws. With Executive Order 9066, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1942, authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps on the West Coast.

In 1965 the Immigration and Nationality Act established what remain the principles of American immigration law today: family reunification, the need for workers, and asylum for refugees. This law also put in place the first cap on immigration from the Americas.

The French Republic began regulating immigration and defining citizenship at about the same time as the US. At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, any man, regardless of his country of birth, was a citizen if he adhered to the principles of the Revolution. During the 1790’s, a time of war, the French favored naturalization by birth, but by 1804, Napoleon’s Civil Code based nationality on blood: a French child is born to a French father. However, the Code allowed a child born in France of foreign parents to request French nationality once of legal age.

As in the United States, immigration laws began to proliferate in the 1850’s with the industrialization of France, but not until 1889 was there a law to define French nationality and the criteria for naturalization: anyone born in France, once of legal age, was French. Until 1993, if we exclude Vichy France (1940-1944), this was the case. In that year, a new law was enacted requiring children born in France of foreign parents to declare their desire to become French before their 21^st birthday. In 1998, this law was abrogated as contrary to the principles of the French Republic.

Since the late 19^th century, much like in the United States, France has periodically opened wide its gates to immigration, especially when in dire need of workers, and just as often violently pulled them shut. As France industrialized rapidly in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, immigrants arrived from Belgium, Spain, Eastern Europe and Italy.

Between the two World Wars, France “imported” workers from its colonies in North Africa and French Indochina, today’s Viet Nam. Even after France’s war with Algeria ended in 1962, France continued to recruit workers from its former colony. 

 

In 1931 France medical students go on strike, protesting the invasion of foreigners. They call them "métèques," a pejorative term for aliens.

In 1981, socialist President François Mitterrand initiated a massive regularization of undocumented immigrants. In 1983, the far-right, anti-immigration party Front National, today known as National Rally, began its rise. In 1990, socialist prime minister Michel Rocard proclaimed, “we cannot take in all the world’s misery. France must remain a land of asylum, but nothing more.”

In our current decade, in the 2022 French presidential elections, National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen, running on a decidedly anti-immigration platform, won 41,5% of the vote. In 2017, running against Macron, she received 21,3%.

On December 19, 2023, the French Senate and Parliament voted into law a bill putting in place new and stricter laws on immigration. Critics argue President Macron’s right-of-center government has simply pushed through the National Rally anti-immigration program. Without its members in Parliament, the law would have never passed.

In a communiqué on its site, the French Senate claims the goals of the law are to 1) facilitate integration into French society; 2) make it easier to expulse foreigners who represent a serious danger for society; 3) improve border control; 4) ensure an overhaul of the asylum system; 5) simplify litigation concerning the entry, stay or expulsion of foreigners.

Those are the broad lines of the new law. In practice it has called into question one of the foundations of the French Republic: the right to equality and freedom from discrimination for all legal residents of France. The new law has created a two-tiered system where legal immigrants have fewer rights and protections than French citizens. It has also done away with, as was the case in 1993, naturalization by birth, and made it much more difficult to obtain the status of asylum seeker. 

The new law has been submitted to the Constitutional Council, which will soon announce whether it is conform to the French Constitution. Many argue it is not.

At least 149 immigrants died trying to cross the US southern border in 2023. The southern border of France is the Mediterranean Sea, where last year, an estimated 2,500 died in drownings. Already in 2024, a mother and her two children drowned in the Rio Grande, allegedly because Texan authorities prevented US border agents from helping them.

 

On February 26, 2023, at least 70 refugees died when their boat sank off the coast of Crotone, in the Calabria region of Italy. These are the remains of the boat, washed up on the shore.

For the United States and France, immigration is a long story. It is probably part of your story as well. At one time our immigrant ancestors may have been considered the “the vermin poisoning the blood” of “real” Americans.