Refugees and terrorists

It was like waking up from a bad dream when I found out that Paris was under siege by terrorists with 129 killed and more than 300 injured according to a running count. Paris has an almost mythical hold of the young and the young at heart. As a dream, it could not be destroyed. Or so I thought. In my time, Paris presented many things to me – there the famous tourist sites, the Champs Elysee, the Etoile etc and etc but what attracted me most of the place I would one day visit is the notion of a café – indeed of two cafes that were said to be just across each other, the Café de Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. I read of these in magazines and books as the places where great intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus would sit around and watch the world walk by. I wanted to go to Paris to be lost in it and meet all kinds of people who thought and lived deeply. And I was able to visit the city of lights and love when I was a young adult, not yet mature and still innocent. I had a little book I carried with me with the title “How to travel on $5 a day.” I walked most of the time and visited the galleries and museums – the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I did meet men who said they loved my black hair and black eyes but I did not succumb to their flirtations, whatever they said about Paris as the place to be “in love.” Still coming to Paris at that time was the fulfillment of a dream. I would have stayed and lived there thinking of working in the American bookstore until I saw a hippie not much older than me defecating on the Seine. In a way, that ended my childhood dream and I decided to return  to a comfortable home with a decent toilet.

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The second time I went to Paris was much much later when I became involved in a campaign for illegal Filipino workers. There were so many of them living in Paris, in what they called “tago ng tago” style. I was married by then and had children of my own.

We were political exiles in London but decided to spend some time in Paris. We rented an apartment and spent the summer so the children could learn French at the Alliance Francaise. With my husband in tow we would talk to the Filipino tago and tago workers and helped them plan a campaign to make them legitimate. After all, they had come to work and they were earning wages to keep body and soul together and still send a little money home. The campaign led them to team up with the French equivalent of the transport and general union in London. At the time socialism was strong and the candidate Francois Mitterand was expected to win the elections. We were able to get close enough to the big bosses of the union. They assured us that the Filipino tago ng tago would be legalized.

I saw a different Paris then. Most of the time I was in their little flats by the side of the huge flats owned by their employers where they worked. These were called service apartments. These had their own entrances. I decided to sleep nights with them to hear their stories. To me  the most difficult was having to share communal toilets. The Filipino workers would apologize they could not offer me better . But that was the only way I could know how Filipinos lived and worked in this beautiful dream of a city. With the help of the French unions the Filipino workers’ cause was given the attention it needed to be legalized. We could just have enjoyed our vacation in Paris but having met the tago ng tago Filipinos we were able to help them get their “papers.” We later heard from them that the Filipino workers papers and appeal to be legitimate workers was at the top of Mitterand’s agenda. It was on his desk on his first day of official work.

That was around the middle 70s. There are more Filipinos coming in. Today, according to Wikipedia there are between 47,000 and 65,000 Filipinos living in France, Some of them are new migrants but there are other who are probably the descendants of the “tago ng tago” Filipinos in Mitterand’s time. And about 33,000 have come in illegally as they did in the 70s. The estimate of illegal Filipinos living in France today is about 33,000 or about 80 percent of them. They can’t apply for citizenship unless they have lived in France for at least 15 years.

Just how long Filipinos have migrated to work in France is little known. During the centennial of the French Revolution in 1889, José Rizal sought to organize a conference called the Association Internationale des Philippinistes Rizal launched with Ferdinand Blumentritt, the president and Edmond Plauchut, the vice president. Rizal wrote the Noli and the Fili while in exile in France..

The French government encouraged Filipinos to work in France, as long as they eventually returned to the Philippines with laws that would keep them as visitors by instituting new migration laws.

Brice Hortefeux, French Minister for Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Development Solidarity, said, “I’ve already put in place, for particularly skilled workers, a specific procedure allowing them a three-year, once-renewable, permit to stay in France. This shows that by encouraging the movement of skilled workers, we are rejecting the brain drain ... We hope it will be useful to both countries.”

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This is the story I wish to tell. It is  a Filipino story that should accompany the horrific events in Paris last week. If I remember right my thoughts were with the refugees stranded in boats trying to leave their troubled lands. Filipinos are not Syrians but they, too, like Syrians are looking for work and the life of native Parisians.

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Of the many statements that have been said against refugees I would like to include that made by Washington governor Jay Inslee on what is really behind the Paris shootings.

“Behind the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 died, an image has already been posted up of five people raising a glass of wine in mute salute under the words Paris encore debout (Paris is still standing). Charlie Hebdo’s cover after the attacks was a beret-wearing French caricature guzzling bubbly, which then pours out of copious bullet holes in the figure’s body, along with the words ils ont les armes, on les emmerde, on a le champagne (They’ve got the weapons, fuck ‘em, we’ve got the champagne).”