Paper Chasers

The word paper is fairly neutral. When we were children, we scribbled on it. We used it to paint, to draw and to create art, with varying degrees of success. I was rubbish at art but I loved paper as there was nothing quite like a clean sheaf on which to scribble my ten year old thoughts. As we grew older, the word paper was adulterated to become synonymous with the cold hard face of currency. Today, the plural form of the word takes on a special significance in the vocabulary of the immigrant. Papers are a whole new currency- it is a hot commodity representing a passport to the right to reside in the developed world. The value of this currency never fluctuates.

There are paper chasers on the streets of Paris: the processions of sans –papiers of Cameroonian men and Ivory Coast women in Barbes-Rochechouart fill the churches of Saint Denis to pray to a God who would wash away old lives and give them new documented ones, in the same way that they fill the bank accounts of unscrupulous avocats who promise every year, next year they will have the legal right to reside and to remain. There are paper chasers in London- Nigerian men and Jamaican women who have overstayed the duration of their permits, armed with either a false British passport or a fake residence permit, or both. They work cash in-hand in hairdressers’ salons in Peckham and on construction sites in Hackney. There are thousands of paper chasers in Brooklyn, New York- Grenadian men and Guyanese women who have literally given up solid, reasonably well paid jobs in the Caribbean or brighter prospects at home, to become one of Patterson’s invisibles- they babysit in New Jersey literally cleaning up the shit after affluent slave-owners employers, they try to fleet in and out unnoticed in Caribbean hair shops and nail shops and takeaways. They make us believe that all is okay with their combination of Baby Phat, lace front weaves, Clarks and Timberlands or all of the above.

Paper chasing has its own rules, its own honour code of conduct and regulations, which vary according to the host country’s norms and mores. I quickly learnt that in the United States, a sophisticated money marriage system exists and it is rare to find a paper marriage for free. When it comes to marriage, there appears to be an irrefutable presumption of illegitimacy. I explained to a friend that someone I knew got married. The immediate question was “Papers?” Wedding photos on Facebook are gossiped and whispered about. More often than not, citizens are paid for their time and trouble, often to sums topping $5000- $10,000. This is presumably to represent the cost of the hassle- mere green card holders do not have permanent rights to reside, so often these arranged marriages subsist for over 7 years to ensure that the deal is seen through to completion. The United States’ Citizenship and Immigration Services is often swiftly on the heels- they require photos showing evidence of long marital life, and I have heard, anecdotally, that the questions they ask require intimate knowledge- what colour is your husband’s toothbrush, what was the colour of the dress you wore on your wedding day? A marriage for papers therefore requires forward planning- an easy familiarity with spouse’s family members and background- it is not for the faint hearted. However, many are unperturbed. I know of citizens who have married three times over to allow spouses to obtain rights to reside. I have heard of couples who plan to migrate and each to marry US citizens to obtain that elusive green card, and then to marry each other after the ordeal. I hope it is worth it and it lasts.

In the UK, there is a more covert, laissez faire approach to paper marriages. There is almost always the ruse of love, and even in cases where there is no ruse- overstayers use the criteria of citizenship to filter out any potential marriage applicants. It is the ultimate economic cost-benefit analysis. What good is it falling in love with someone who cannot help? Older women are often targeted. Lots of Eastern Europeans in economically strained circumstances consent to these marriages and contract them for sums as low as £1,000.

Nothing really surprises me about green card marriages in the US anymore except for the profile of those who overstay and who seek to undertake them. I probably expect them of persons who are unemployed in their home countries or those who really have nothing to lose. College graduates really should know better. Is at home so bad? The bourgeois set from the Caribbean/Africa whose parents sent them abroad every summer. Surely during their many sojourns proper research could have been undertaken as to the myriad ways to enter and to remain legally in the West. Up to two years ago, the UK offered working holiday visas and nanny visas to Caribbean nationals, yet thousands still chose to come through the system illegally. Is it the thrill of the chase or is it pure ignorance, the failure to question and to be informed, accepting this indignity of crouching low in another man’s country as the only way? Papers are ascribed an almost mythical significance- "she ehn fix up yet". Someone I know referred to a mutual friend with a  BA, MA and PhD as "not having shit" on the basis that she did not yet have the permanent right to reside. This, to me, is incredulous.

Many who migrate do not tell us the real story, they present a skewed picture of what they romantically term the “hustle”. They do not tell the truth- that the hustle is really a sale. It is a trade in peace of mind for economic gain, without which many of our families would probably not have advanced, but this does not make the choice any more viable or sane. They do not say that the wheel of the hustle is notoriously difficult to climb atop because there are thousands, if not millions of hustlers running along for that chance, to do the job for longer hours than they would, at a pay vastly cheaper than they would, and yes, probably better than they would. They keep quiet the fact that not many employers would take the risk so that for every yes there are maybe one hundred no’s. That to pay bills and to keep on top of rent and demands at home, the hustle becomes two and three and even four hustles, with no time for rest. They keep it on the down low that they are often paid less than permanent residents for doing the very same job. That unscrupulous rich families in the East side would try to hold on to their passports and make them work for more than their contracted hours because they knew that they do not have a choice. That every hustler knows of at least one mother or father whose sons or daughters died whilst they were abroad and that he/she could not come home to bury their own children. And that yes there are no taxes, but undocumented there is also no NHS, no insurance, no services if you happen fall sick. That the hustle may also involve having sex with a man you do not like or love. That very often you learn to love the man you are having sex with, because only that offers a way out.

I do not judge our paper chasers. I envy their audacity and their resilience. I could not do it. I have too much pride to eat at the crumbs that fall of the table of another man’s country whilst its citizens dine Michelin-style. I judge instead the failure of our own countries to harness the skills of its citizens, to create employment opportunities, to encourage initiative among our people so that it won’t be necessary for us to leave. If all the “hustlers” hustled at the same rate in the same way in their home countries, the Third World would be buzzing with vibrance and economic actitivy. I judge the developed West with its McFoods and McJobs and McEducation that lure us with McPromises. And I hope, that by the Grace of God, I would never be placed in a position where all I feel I can do is to paper chase. No one should.

(Pic from www.paperchase.co.uk. All rights reserved. Paper Chase has nothing to do with paper chasing or illegal immigration).

Les Miserables

When you look at a guidebook on Paris and France, they don't tell you that Paris can be a shithole.

They don't tell you that behind the gilded, sparkling edifice of the Eiffel Tower, the money-green Prada counters of Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, the creamy yummy ooziness of a La Durée macaroon de pistache, the self indulgent architectural expanse of the Louvre, the story book quaintness of the cobbled streets of the Marais, and the raving bacchanalia that occurs in the bars of Bastille, lie stories and lives so poor, so excluded, so caked in shit it can actually make you sick.

I arrived in Paris in 2003, literally wrapped in cotton from dewy Cambridge, eagerly grasping this once in a lifetime chance to live-Paris-and-die. My professors sold me the dream and I swallowed it whole: I was lucky to be able to do a Maitrise in the best law university that topped even the Sorbonne. I was conveniently not told that the same establishment had a rich tradition of an extreme right wing student union which only recently had organised an attack on a couple of left wing students, burning them with cigarettes. I appreciated very much going to the only university in Paris with armed security.

My home was not a grand old apartment with a view overlooking the Seine as you saw in the last episode of Sex and the City (I did have views of amazing piles of dogshit) but a miniscule room in the College Franco Britannique of the Cite Universitaire. There I was taught my first lesson in segregation- we were housed by country of origin echoing the economic world order- the American House first with an outward facing view, the British College second and as life imitates art, the levels of amenities decreased as one went further and further down the GDP scale. No one wanted to live in the Maison de Cambodge. My first few months in this great city of culture and world class gastronomy were therefore not spent munching croissants aux amandes in continental cafés: they were spent having a 3 euro meal of greying beef and spaghetti at the CROUS (the student cafeteria), served by a few ethnic Albanians, quiet Algerians and bustling Cameroonians, all of whom had spilt dreams and washed out stories in a grand old building that smelt of bleach.

No one had told me before about Chateau' d'Eau and Strasbourg- St Denis, mere minutes from the Centre Georges Pompidou- these quartiers that would make Peckham look like West Hampstead and Flatbush look like 34th Street.  Where a young girl named Aimée braids hair for less than 15 euros in a rotting building that houses six other "hair salons" and out of this sum pays for her chair, and for a tout who would congregate with the other crushing Senegalese, Ivoirian, Sierra Leonean bodies to accost and jostle and plead with you as you exit the middle passage of the metro station with shouts of "Tissages- Pas Cher (Cheap Weaves) and Ongles (Nails"). No one had had the gall to explain that a mere 10 minutes from Gare du Nord, on the way to Stade St Denis, I would find a crumbling banlieue rich only in the lies of ministers that it would all be addressed come the next election, a generation of youth whose unintelligible verlan dialect reflected their lack of assimilation and integration into mainstream French society. They don't tell you in the guidebooks that young Martiniquan boys in Clichy-sous-bois have never been to the Orsay or would never be able to point you to the Rodin museum; they hang out instead in "Chatelet", the underground monstrosity of a shopping centre in their new "baskets" (sneakers"). There, they eschew raclettes, confits de canard and fondues for buckets of greasy KFC. These boys from Douala and Pointe a Pierre live in Paris but dream of America.

Paris also has a serious case of Tourette's: it is uncomfortable and restless with itself and as a result, is frequently in an eruptive state. For starters, Paris is filled to the brim with the overeducated unemployed. Take my fellow graduate friend Thomas for instance, after having completed a Licence in law, his Maitrise, a DEA and a DESS (doctoral level studies), he struggles to find a job and is considering moving to Switzerland or to Brussels "Il n'y a rien ici" he mutters. France is perhaps the only country in the world where an education costs less than a plane ticket- 400 euros pays for a year's tuition - but perhaps the only country in the world where it is usual to work for free for 6 months at a time to obtain an elusive placement. Unemployment benefits can reach up to 60% of salary but nothing can compensate for the feeling that you have wasted your time. Those who are not unemployed strike. For just about anything. The SNCF can cripple Parisian society in one day.

Paris is also like a surly child - very suspicious of strangers. Arabs known also as "rabeurs" (Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians) were part of the first wave immigrants to reside near Paris in suburban congregations (cités). These cités have become completely lawless. The French government is notoriously apathetic- they openly say that to defend the law in these suburbs it futile and dangerous. A friend, Malik, complains that "the system favours French citizens with French sounding names and French physiognomy": he has no job and in a city that requires him to list his address and name in every job application and to attach a photo with his CV, he has resigned himself to the fact that he may never have one. The French principle of laicité (no privilege on the grounds of any affiliation) prevents any recognition of special rights and privileges based on minority status so the government remains distant, powerless and  content to proclaim "liberté, egalité, fraternité".

Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Paris does not feel very fraternal to Claudine, whose parents (fully French, the Parisians boast) have travelled from the "perles" of France (les Antilles- the West Indies) to take low paying jobs in the Metropole. Her parents' contemporaries, who left France to settle in Martinique, are paid subsidies for the "inconvenience" of living in the Caribbean. The anger at such unequal treatment fueled the uprisings of February 2009 in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Martiniquais and Guadeloupians were furious that these “Bekes”, the descendants of the old French and the economic migrants to those islands retained a privileged status, and continued to economically exploit the indigenous minority through their monopoly over land and business. The islanders marched through the streets “Guadeloupe is ours, not theirs” they chanted. Even so, my friend from Gabon "sans papiers" (without papers), envies the Antillais. "Why are they complaining? At least they can work". Claudine slants her eyes "We are French. We are not black. We are mixed".

This méfiance of strangers is not confined to immigrants; Paris is suspicious of all foreigners who are not tourists. Tourists they can cope with- they are going back. To be fully French and resident means you can have it good- generous benefits, subsidised housing, free healthcare. An anglosaxon American is likely to face the same barriers as a South African, a Canadian, a Japanese national when trying to rent an apartment or opening a bank account- in Paris to be French is a specially reserved privilege.

Another not so well kept secret is that Paris a city of grandiose paper pushing bureaucracy. Like a decrepit old lady, it struggles to keep up with itself. Obtaining a carte de séjour, a task that should be a mere administrative formality, becomes almost like going to confession- a weekly monotonous visit to the Mairie or the Prefecture where one is reprimanded for not following the correct form. The beauty of Paris is ill reconciled with the city that can frustrate you when trying to open up a bank account, apply for a mortgage, or a credit card, in fact when you are trying to do anything remotely useful. France does leisure very well, too well. On the rare days that the banks are not closed for a two hour lunch break or there isn't a national strike, the sheer rudeness of the assistants can make you weep. This is the city where shop assistants will look in disdain at your shopping and tell you to put back the sweets because you would get fat, where a bank manager would clear your account and hand you back the cash when you request an overdraft, where you can wait up to one hour to post a single letter.

I was twenty and not feeling it. This was not the Paris where Thomas Jefferson lived with Sally Hemmings, where generations of intellectuals congregated to taste freedom -Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, James Baldwin, Richard Wright. This was supposed to be the Paris of the Grand Hotel on the Place de l'Opera where W.E.B. Dubois organised the first Pan African Congress in 1919 and the Paris I lived was not it.

I returned to France in 2008, nervously, for six months. I lived in that grand old apartment with a view overlooking the Seine, two metres away from the Atelier de Joel Robuchon (he trained Gordon Ramsey). I spent my evenings having crusty baguettes and St Marcellin and carafes of Beaujolais three steps from the Champs Elysees. I spent weekends in the champagne region and Saturday afternoons browsing the Louis Vuitton shop at Le Bon Marché. I called Thomas. He had found a job as an intellectual property lawyer. Malik was going back to Algeria. Claudine was doing a second Master 1. Aimée was in the same shop, still plaiting hair...


*Dedicated to the city I love to love and hate all at the same time*