immigrants

So Sarkozy won because he bashed immigrants. And he still does bash them, as much as he can. Small gestures, hunt every day. Expelling hundreds, thousands of Romanians and Bulgarians in the last month before they joined the EU (and returned legally, after a trip home courtesy of the French taxpayers) just to inflate numbers. Increasing several times over a couple of years the number of years spouses of French citizens have to wait until they become French. And who opposes this? No one it seems.

But why? If the left is the party of the poor, and/or the party of equality, it has a duty to defend the immigrants, which generally are the poorest. It also has a duty to support immigration, because what makes wages so low in poor countries and makes "offshoring" jobs so easy, is that capital can move (which is GOOD, it means poor countries can go out of poverty!) but labour cannot (which is BAD - it means capital has a much stronger negotiating position). If labour could move more freely, wages would go up faster in poorer countries. This is exactly what happened in Eastern Europe since it joined the EU, contrary to what paranoid French afraid of the "plombier polonais" thought...

Well, all this are idealistic reasons. Don't expect anyone to act on them. So what, let's turn to pure power politics. France has long had one of the most "liberal" (precisely, etimologically) citizenship regimes around - if you are born here, you are French. So France has millions of French citizens of (recent) foreign origin. They could easily turn around elections the way blacks did for Barack Obama in many places...But no one bothers to talk to them! Just as any other poorer and generally less educated and less influential minority, they vote less than average. And no one is trying to organize them, mobilize them. No wonder the left has written off so many cities with large immigrant populations, which instead elect solidly far-right mayors (either officially far-right, or de facto). How dumb are our political elites, I wonder?