The Timebomb Ticking for France in the Department of Mayotte

Marine Le Pen’s lieutenant and heir apparent at the head of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, is paying today a visit to Mayotte, a tiny, overcrowded island in the Indian Ocean, halfway between Mozambique and Madagascar. “What happens now in Mayotte might well be our future in France,” Mr. Bardella said a fortnight ago, “unless we manage to control immigration tightly.”A former colonial dependency, Mayotte became the 101st French département, meaning county, in 2014. In legal and constitutional terms, it is as French as Hawaii is American. However, a bit counter-intuitively, it is also a National Rally stronghold. Madame Le Pen garnered 42.9 percent of the vote there in the 2017 French presidential election, and a stunning 59.1 percent in the vote in 2022.The issue of immigration is indeed what brings together National Rally, a party that stands for France’s Christian and European roots, and Mayotte’s African-Arab Muslim population. National Rally keeps warning that uncontrolled, illegal non-European immigration may eventually destroy the very fabrics of Metropolitan French society and economy.Mahorans — Mayotte’s native inhabitants — say that uncontrolled, illegal immigration from neighboring countries is already destroying their own way of life. Over the past weeks, the island was plagued by eerie civil war scenes. Gangs of teenaged illegal aliens were roaming from one part of the département to another, terrorizing and ransoming ordinary citizens or engaging into mafia-style intergang fighting.Roads were scattered with burnt cars or mutilated corpses. Most people stayed at home after 6 p.m. Schools had to be turned into semi-fortified compounds, complete with barbed wire fences. Eventually, France dispatched the elite Raid police force and an additional Gendarmerie (National Constabulary) unit to restore a measure of order and law.What, though, about the longer term? One of the island’s two conservative representatives at France’s National Assembly, Estelle Youssoufa, insists: “We need more military forces to be stationed permanently. And more National Navy boats to patrol the sea. The Paris government does not seem to realize what is at stake.”According to the French statistical bureau, Insee, more than 50 percent of the 300,000 inhabitants of Mayotte are foreigners, mostly illegal. Even if Mayotte is poor by French global standards (its local GDP per capita in 2022 is $13,163, approximately one-fourth of Metropolitan France’s $46,340), it is rich by regional standards (the per capita GDPs of the Comoros, Mozambique, and Madagascar are respectively $1,380, $595, and $475). The name of the game for non-Mahorans is to cross the sea every night on kwassas-kwassas, light fishers’ skiffs. Once they land illegally on Mayotte’s beaches, they enjoy France’s (and the European Union’s) provisions for migrants and asylum-seekers, including free medical care and free schooling for children. The French authorities say that they intercept 70 percent of the skiffs, and that most of the illegal immigrants are actually facing deportation. Mahoran officials question these figures. While 25,000 aliens are currently being herded in “transit camps,” many are eventually allowed to stay, with the help of human rights organizations. Not to mention those who blend with earlier arrivants and escape police monitoring.The trump card, in this context, is the “anchor babies.” There are a disproportionate number of pregnant women aboard the kwassas-kwassas. Until 2018, their babies were granted full French citizenship upon birth: a matter of jus solis, as it is the case in Metropolitan France. This, in turn, would make deportation even less likely, and open the way to a family reunification process for the fathers and other relatives. Things are supposed to be more restricted now: under a special local jus sanguinis law passed at the Mahorans’ request, one of the parents at least must be a legal resident, and the children themselves must wait for several years until acceding to French citizenship. However, the new regime has not stemmed the illegal immigration of pregnant women, nor kept illegal alien mothers from having children. The main difference is apparently that illegal immigrants have switched from a short term to a longer term “anchor babies” investment.The maternity hospital at Mamoudzou, the island’s capital, is the largest in the European Union. Out of 11,000 babies born there in 2021, more than 7,000 (nearly 70 percent) had foreign mothers, some of them as young as 14 or 15 years old. According to a local newspaper, Journal de Mayotte, the figures grew by 16 percent in 2022.The more alien families and children there are in Mayotte, the more difficult it is for the French government to take care of them. France currently spends 1.8 billion euros on the island, more than three times what it did ten years ago. Yet most alien families are unemployed or underpaid, and live in slums. As for the educational framework, it is simply collapsing. “One would need to build one school every month and hire hundreds of teachers, just to keep up with the demographic growth,” Mamoudzou officials say. It is estimated that about 7,000 teenage children live “outside the system.” No legal identity, no family, no schooling. They turn to the criminal gangs to make a living.It would be a mistake to dismiss Mr. Bardella’s concern about Metropolitan France’s Mayotte-style future. Last month, a former director of the French external security agency, Pierre Brochand, bluntly reminded the Senate’s Gaullist caucus that half a million immigrants, both legal and illegal, enter France every year, and that most of them don’t assimilate. “This is our main political issue, period,” he warned.

The Timebomb Ticking for France in the Department of Mayotte

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