Moved by plight, French shelter illegals

Hakun Bingolbali, a rambunctious 6-year-old born in the Kurdish region of southeast Turkey, says he is French, no question about it.

He does not know that his parents are living in France illegally, that the authorities want to deport them, and that one reason they keep changing apartments is to avoid the police. What he knows is that he is surrounded by friends.

"We have a lot of people who help us," said the little boy, chattering away in fluent French despite the purple lollipop lodged in his mouth. "They like us to live here."

Like dozens, perhaps hundreds, of illegal immigrant families across France, the Bingolbalis – mother, father, Hakun, and twin 3-year-old boys – have been adopted by a circle of neighbors, strangers, and activists who say they are ready to hide them, if necessary, to prevent the government from sending them away.

At a time when the French parliament is in the final stages of drafting a tough new immigration law and French politicians worry openly about assimilating even legal immigrants, the plight of such families has drawn ordinarily apolitical people into a volatile national debate.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to step up the number of deportations to 25,000 this year as part of a drive to better police the country's borders and control immigration. Last fall, in the face of highly publicized protests over the forced removal of some students, he offered to hold off deporting families with schoolchildren, but said the respite would end when the school year came to a close July 4.

With that deadline approaching, the French press has been full of stories of middle-class families, farmers, and schoolteachers rallying around immigrant children whose parents face deportation.

In some cases, the children have been shifted secretly from safe house to safe house after school.

In other places like Nantes, a port city on the Atlantic coast, the volunteers have opted to publicize the situation of such children as a way to prick the public conscience, although sheltering an illegal immigrant is against the law.

"I don't mind going to prison – it would be an experience," said Marie Katrin Leray-Louet, a Nantes widow who has volunteered to help Hakun's family. "The main thing, though, is that I want to give physical and moral support to the family. You can't live as an egoist."

The effort to pair immigrants with sponsors has garnered attention, but doesn't constitute a mass movement in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Opinion polls regularly show that a majority of French people, regardless of their political leanings, favor tighter immigration rules, and many of the volunteers said they have no illusions of changing anti-immigrant attitudes.

But through a combination of demonstrations, sympathetic media coverage, and political savvy, the sanctuary movement has managed to at least temporarily put a human face on the issue at a time when presidential hopefuls like Mr. Sarkozy, on both the right and the left, are trying to burnish their law-and-order image.

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