Paris: Protest du Jour

protestation: protest

travailleurs: workers

sans: without

papiers: papers (either plain ol' paper or documents...just as we use the word papers in the US)

travailleurs sans papiers: undocumented workers, illegal aliens

Paris serves as a booming capital city and a meeting place for the world. Throughout its history Paris has become the home and haven to a long list of exiles and political dissidents such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, Baby Doc Duvalier, Lenin, etc. Like Washington, DC, there seems to be a different protest here every day.

This weekend there was a major street march in Montparnasse denouncing Israel's attack on the Gaza relief flotilla. There was a much smaller gathering in the Trocodero I encountered of Peruvians trying to save the Amazon.

Yesterday -and into the night- however, I encountered a big protest gathering by the travailleurs sans papiers -a group of sub-Saharan Africans living and working in France as undocumented workers. They gathered yesterday in front of the Opera Bastille.  Some of the men were asking pedestrians for donations. Others sang and played on drums.

Later in the night when I walked by -because the Metro stop is next to the Opera, perhaps 100-200 men were sleeping on the sidewalks in front of the Opera. It was a strange and sad sight. It underscores the debate going on in almost every prosperous industrialized country -in China with North Koreans, in France with Africans, in the US with Mexicans- around what to do with undocumented workers. As in the US, these low-paid, low-skill immigrants do a lot of the dirty work in France. So, they are needed in the labor market to some extent but are the first fired when the economy goes into recession.