💠Algerians Return Home Amid Islamophobia in France💠
Wednesday 14 August 2024Year 1959 Number 12325 /Kayhan English newspaper
💠Algerians Return Home Amid Islamophobia in France💠
PARIS (Middle East Eye) -- Souad is preparing to move to Algiers in a few months. The 45-year-old French-Algerian woman, a legal assistant living in Lyon, has chosen her parents’ country to start a new life with her 12-year-old son.
“The bad atmosphere in France is pushing me towards the exit a little,” she told Middle East Eye.
“Like all children of immigrants, I have always experienced racism and discrimination, but it was not on the same scale as today. It’s becoming relentless,” she added.
Souad said she no longer wanted to live “in a society that rejects” her. “I’ve reached a point where I don’t find it normal anymore. I’m fed up.”
On social media, other Algerians born or raised in France, mostly young but sometimes elderly, both women and men, married or single, with children or not, are showing the same desire to cross the Mediterranean for a one-way trip.
They exchange ideas in Facebook groups such as “Make a successful hijra [migration, exile] to Algeria” or “Return to live in Algeria”, where, like Souad, they criticize the rise in racism and Islamophobia in France.
In February, the Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin indicated that anti-Muslim acts had increased by 30 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Out of the 242 acts recorded, more than half were committed in the last three months of 2023, the minister specified, seeing a link with the start of the Israeli war on Gaza in October.
Notably, Darmanin acknowledged that anti-Muslim acts in the country were “clearly still underestimated.”
“I no longer feel at home in France. Despite my studies and my long career in teaching, I am constantly brought back to my origins,” Boussad, a mathematics teacher in a Paris high school, told MEE.
“Racism has become uninhibited. It is unleashed all day long on television screens.”
In a couple of years, the 63-year-old man will retire and he plans to settle with his wife in his parents’ house in Maatkas, in Kabylia, the Tamazight-speaking region in the north of Algeria.
“This house was the only place where my father really felt at home, among his loved ones,” he told MEE.
“When I was young, we lived in a council estate in France and I didn’t understand my father’s stubbornness in wanting to build this house in Kabylia.
“But as I grew older, I could measure the weight of the exclusion he faced as a modest construction painter and his intense desire to return to his country,” the teacher said.
For the first generations of immigrants, the prospect of returning to their native country was an essential element of the migration project.
As Algerian sociologist Abelmalek Sayad pointed out in his essay La Double Absence, Algerian immigrant workers experienced their presence in France as a “necessary exile” while at the same time hoping to return home someday.
“When we were little and my father took us to Algeria for the holidays in El Kseur, near Bejaia [in Kabilya, 220 km east of Algiers], he never stopped praising the beauty of the country,” Bachir, a 33-year-old French-Algerian truck driver from the northern city of Roubaix, told MEE.
His father secretly nurtured the dream of acquiring a pied-a-terre where the family could all live forever, Bachir said. But his project never became reality. As a warehouse worker, he barely earned enough to meet their needs.
Today, as if to take his revenge, Bachir has decided to take the plunge himself with his own family.
“I am taking exactly the same path as my father 40 years ago, but in the opposite direction,” he
said jokingly, before pointing to a climate of hatred against foreigners and Muslims that makes France “unlivable”.
“I want my two daughters to grow up in a society that does not push them to the margins because of their name, their skin color and their religion,” he said.
💠Algerians Return Home Amid Islamophobia in France💠
PARIS (Middle East Eye) -- Souad is preparing to move to Algiers in a few months. The 45-year-old French-Algerian woman, a legal assistant living in Lyon, has chosen her parents’ country to start a new life with her 12-year-old son.
“The bad atmosphere in France is pushing me towards the exit a little,” she told Middle East Eye.
“Like all children of immigrants, I have always experienced racism and discrimination, but it was not on the same scale as today. It’s becoming relentless,” she added.
Souad said she no longer wanted to live “in a society that rejects” her. “I’ve reached a point where I don’t find it normal anymore. I’m fed up.”
On social media, other Algerians born or raised in France, mostly young but sometimes elderly, both women and men, married or single, with children or not, are showing the same desire to cross the Mediterranean for a one-way trip.
They exchange ideas in Facebook groups such as “Make a successful hijra [migration, exile] to Algeria” or “Return to live in Algeria”, where, like Souad, they criticize the rise in racism and Islamophobia in France.
In February, the Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin indicated that anti-Muslim acts had increased by 30 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Out of the 242 acts recorded, more than half were committed in the last three months of 2023, the minister specified, seeing a link with the start of the Israeli war on Gaza in October.
Notably, Darmanin acknowledged that anti-Muslim acts in the country were “clearly still underestimated.”
“I no longer feel at home in France. Despite my studies and my long career in teaching, I am constantly brought back to my origins,” Boussad, a mathematics teacher in a Paris high school, told MEE.
“Racism has become uninhibited. It is unleashed all day long on television screens.”
In a couple of years, the 63-year-old man will retire and he plans to settle with his wife in his parents’ house in Maatkas, in Kabylia, the Tamazight-speaking region in the north of Algeria.
“This house was the only place where my father really felt at home, among his loved ones,” he told MEE.
“When I was young, we lived in a council estate in France and I didn’t understand my father’s stubbornness in wanting to build this house in Kabylia.
“But as I grew older, I could measure the weight of the exclusion he faced as a modest construction painter and his intense desire to return to his country,” the teacher said.
For the first generations of immigrants, the prospect of returning to their native country was an essential element of the migration project.
As Algerian sociologist Abelmalek Sayad pointed out in his essay La Double Absence, Algerian immigrant workers experienced their presence in France as a “necessary exile” while at the same time hoping to return home someday.
“When we were little and my father took us to Algeria for the holidays in El Kseur, near Bejaia [in Kabilya, 220 km east of Algiers], he never stopped praising the beauty of the country,” Bachir, a 33-year-old French-Algerian truck driver from the northern city of Roubaix, told MEE.
His father secretly nurtured the dream of acquiring a pied-a-terre where the family could all live forever, Bachir said. But his project never became reality. As a warehouse worker, he barely earned enough to meet their needs.
Today, as if to take his revenge, Bachir has decided to take the plunge himself with his own family.
“I am taking exactly the same path as my father 40 years ago, but in the opposite direction,” he
said jokingly, before pointing to a climate of hatred against foreigners and Muslims that makes France “unlivable”.
“I want my two daughters to grow up in a society that does not push them to the margins because of their name, their skin color and their religion,” he said.
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