principal theme in the electoral programmes.
At the end of the millennium, the outcry against immigration became one of the great the main political themes of that period. What were the facts about Settlers? At the outset it was European governments that promoted the recruitment of foreign workers to feed the demand of industry for low cost labour that started the great movement of population to their countries.
In spite of high unemployment rates in Europe some sectors of the market continued to rely on foreign workers to do the jobs that Europeans did not want to do, that is mostly dangerous and demanding work. Whilst the anti-settler movement gathered force governments announced that tens of thousands of foreign workers would be needed each year to fill jobs that Gallos refused.
Mass migration was also a by-product of the sudden global economic and political transformations. Ease of transportation and the opening of economies of developing nations reinforced the wave of migration.
In Europe the rapid changes with the collapse of the soviet system and the extension of the Federation to the countries of the former soviet block. Political upheaval coincided with the growth of ethno-nationalism.
The governments of European had observed helplessly the developments in the Maghrib and in particular Algeria, and when the inevitable collapse of the regime took place there was little they could do to prevent the huge exodus to France that they had feared for so long. Over half of the Maghrib’s population was under twenty-five years old and without hope in the face of the massive unemployment that reigned in the country with as much as fifty percent in Algeria. The chaos that followed the overthrow of the regime was a golden opportunity for the ever-growing army of unemployed and desperate to flee to France as refugees.
With the mounting flood the man in the street saw with his own eyes that there were simply too many uncontrolled new arrivals. It was evident that there were limits to granting asylum to the refugees. Over the years the state had been unable to contain the arrival of infiltrators and asylum seekers arriving year after year.
There were the inevitable economic consequences of mass migration. In the past in Europe the conventional economic sectors had grown providing jobs for the newcomers, but with the post industrial transformation the labour demand fell and the rates of unemployment among Neos increased in startling proportions with up to four times more unemployment among the Neos than that of the Gallos, causing the generous French social security system to sag under the load.
Little by little the Neos were transforming the demographic landscape of France. Two-thirds of all Neos in France had their organs in North Africa. They were visibly different and provoked a growing concern when they were concentrated in the cités and banlieues.
Their neighbourhoods were clearly delimited and forming a barrier, preventing the assimilation of the new populations into the mainstream of French society, provoking cultural conflicts that many French saw as unacceptable as the recent were reluctance to give up their cultural traditions compared to the earlier waves of Settlers.
As the events in Algeria spread to its neighbours France was faced the greatest wave of non-Gallo settlement it had ever known. The refugees were different from those who came before, they arrived in large numbers and were grouped together forming clear ethnic units, with less knowledge of the country to which they had arrived. They had less education, following the Arabisation of Algeria they had less knowledge of the French language and culture, they were less skilled, more prone to have difficulties with the law, and consequently less inclined to share French culture and values. They felt little or no loyalty to France and saw very little need to become French in name or spirit, listening to the Muslim religious and cultural associations that were by then well established in the big cities of France.
The cultural norms and values of the new refugees were incompatible with those of France's centuries old cultural traditions. Almost imperceptibly political ideology had given way to cultural and ethnic identities not only amongst the Neos who had forged their own specific identity, but amongst the Gallos, who counted amongst them Corsicans, Flemings, Alsatians, Bretons, French West Indians, Jews, Armenians and a long established Muslim community. The French, who continued to promote their cultural identity and language, were faced by the insurmountable problem by the assimilation of the non-Gallos.
With an officially recognised population of over six million Muslims, and no doubt much higher, France had the largest Islamic presence of any country in Western Europe, in both absolute and relative terms. Of this number, ninety percent had their roots in North African and especially Algeria, followed by Morocco and Tunisia.
The Settlers and Neos lived concentrated together in the suburbs of its towns and cities, transforming them into islands of Islam, relegating Neos to the second class citizens on the periphery of the cities, living isolated from the prosperous Gallos, thus creating their own subculture and stoking their anger.
The Arabs drifted towards crime, and often of a violent nature. Arab gang, rammed stolen cars into banks, foreign exchange offices and jewellery stores, without the least hesitation used violence and firearms. In Nice and Marseille behind the idyllic appearance of the Côte d'Azur, a violence society stoked up pressure that was to finally lead to the confrontation and explosion.
Many Gallos started to see the very nature of their country was in danger. Some believed that France was on the road that would transform it into an Arab and Muslim country within three or four generations unless the politicians took decisive action. The reasons were visibly demographic and political. Whilst the French were not replacing their own population, the North Africans on the southern shore had one of the highest rates of reproduction in the world. The menace was that the North Africans would ineluctably fill the vacuum in France unless pre-emptive action was taken.
As a post-Christian country, France, not for the first time in recent history, lacked the will to take decisive action against a force that menaced them. Men like d’Albignac had realised that the force had been nurtured from within; Islamisation had taken root and was accelerating, propelled by the arrival of a new wave of refugees. As the Muslims rapidly gained in numbers and political sophistication, the possibility of French civilization being replaced by the Neo sons and daughters of the Settlers was becoming frighteningly real for many Gallos.
At the beginning of the century a quarter of the population had its roots in foreign lands with the percentage in Paris being much higher. Tens of thousands of blacks and tens of thousands of Asians and hundreds of thousands of Arabs walked the streets beside the native born Gallos, of real Christian European ancestry.
Not since fifteenth-century Spain had any Western European country had so substantial a Muslim presence. And for years settlement of populations from the Islamic countries has looked destabilizing, as tension has increased between the children of Arab Settlers and alarmed Gallos who questioned their assimilability.
Looting and burning became the common expression of the Neos rampaging against their second-class status but also applying pressure on the weak politicians to give in to their demands.
The Neos of Maghribis origin were visibly different from the Gallos; discrimination against them was on the basis of both race and class. It worked on the principal that a non-Gallo by his race was by definition part of the non-class. Few succeeded in crossing the class divide and being assimilated into French society, becoming French, those who did discreetly abandoned their origins and even though they were non-Gallos by race they were accepted.
However, this posed a problem since in inevitably meant the Neos accept a secular society, as most Gallos did, by denying their religion. The majority of believers could never such a condition, and since Islam holds that all legitimate political power flows from the Koran in an Islamic state. France, on the other hand, was a secular society where the Church was separated from State by law. As a consequence a conflict between a state based on the Rights of Man and a religion that, strictly interpret
ed refused that vision, was inevitable.
The new waves of Settlers shook the foundations of what being French meant. Islam overtook Protestantism and Judaism becoming by a long distance the second religion of France.
Soon France had more Muslims than practicing Catholics. By the mid-nineties thirty percent of Muslims were believers and practicing, which meant that Islam would inevitably become the country's predominant religion.
Islam's emergence in France was however much more significant than that, more especially in the years that followed. The Settlers and their Neo descendants were concentrated in a few major cities and regions such as Paris, Marseille, the Rhône-Alpes region, and around Lille. Whilst France’s Gallo population had barely replaced itself with a birth rate similar to that of the other countries of the Federation, the Settlers from Islamic countries had been many times more fertile.
Gradually the disparity in birth rates and the concentration of the Muslim population meant that in those French cities a new and unforeseen element in Gallo French society came into being, the Muslims, who numbered over one third of the population and who became a potential political force to be reckoned with.
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