Moved by plight, French shelter illegals

"For 15 years, we've had propaganda from the extreme right that immigrants are responsible for AIDS, for crime, for unemployment," says Richard Moyon, a teacher in the Paris suburbs who has rallied schools to protect and help students threatened with expulsion. "But it really opens peoples' eyes when they realize that the illegal immigrants are the school pals of their children. Then they want to help."

Although there are no firm statistics, the government estimates that some 200,000 to 400,000 foreigners are living illegally in France. Mr. Moyon, who founded a network of teachers called Education Without Borders, said that number includes at least 50,000 children who were either born in France or slipped into the country with one or both parents.

While children under the age of 18 do not have to have formal residence permits, the police have generally tried to deport youngsters along with their older relatives. Mr. Sarkozy has said that prefects in each French region, who represent the state, should evaluate each family deportation on a case by case basis, taking into account whether the family's children have regularly attended school in France. Earlier this month, he also instructed prefects to raise the one-time compensation offered to illegal immigrants in return for leaving voluntarily. Couples can now receive up to 7,000 euros ($8,800), and an additional 2,000 euros ($2,500) per child.

The prefects' discretion in immigration cases has meant that grass-roots activists have been able to mobilize public opinion – or at least the media – to block some deportations.

In Nantes, for example, activists say that no child and no family in its entirety has been deported in the last two years.

"The prefect here warned us that if we went to the media with our cases, we'd never get the families legalized," says Frederic Cherki, a teacher who has organized sit-ins to help immigrants get housing and now matches volunteers with families at risk of deportation. "But we found that wasn't the case at all."

On Tuesday alone, Mr. Cherki received 40 calls or e-mails from people offering to help the estimated 100 illegal immigrant families living in Nantes. Fifty-five of those families have already been paired with volunteers.

Other leaders of the volunteer movement have tried to draw a parallel between helping immigrant families in today's France and hiding Jewish children threatened with death in World War II.

"One reason why there's been such a good response to our efforts to help immigrant schoolchildren is because of our history," says Mr. Moyon. "We are very careful when we make such comparisons, because the threat in the past was genocide. But it's only natural that people ask themselves what they would have done then if a Jewish child in front of them was at risk of being rounded up."

Giles Gelgon, a Nantes actor and playwright who volunteered to help an illegal immigrant family, says he thought of that analogy himself. "This is a lot less dangerous than it was to take in a Jewish family in the war," Mr. Gelgon says. Noting that relatively few French people did so 60 years ago, he adds, "And maybe it's because of that, that we are doing this now."

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