For French-Algerians and Algerian-French, No Place to Truly Call Home

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/world/africa/france-algeria-immigration-discrimination-racism.html

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CAP FALCON, Algeria — The fishermen of Cap Falcon, a peaceful beach on Algeria’s western Mediterranean coast, swear they can see the Spanish mountaintops when the weather is clear. So tantalizingly close is Europe, the beach is a favorite launching point for the “harragas,” as illegal migrants are known here.

The first rocks of Cabo de Gata, a part of Spain, are just 120 miles away — a trip that takes 18 hours with a 30-horsepower engine if all works smoothly. But the ultimate goal for Algerians is almost always France.

“For us, Spain is just a stop; we leave it to Moroccans,” said Belaid Ouis, 40, who left Algeria 10 years ago but returned in June. “Our goal is to reach France, because of the language and the common history.”

As a consequence of the 132 years of French colonization of Algeria, the two nations remain intimately entwined, if not always happily. The continuing ebb and flow, legally or not, of people like Mr. Ouis has created a population of Franco-Algerians and Algerian-French who often live uncomfortably in either place, and whom neither country has fully embraced.

Since the first wave of Algerian emigration before and during World War I, the migratory flow has never stopped. It was bolstered by France’s need to ensure its reconstruction after the two world wars, and fed by Algerian workers searching for jobs.

The independence of Algeria in 1962 barely slowed the tide. The number of Algerian emigrants kept climbing through family reunifications, and by the mid-1980s, about one million people of Algerian descent were living in France. During Algeria’s civil turmoil in the 1990s, tens of thousands more people fled the violence between the army and Islamists.

The latest chapter of that century-old story of migration is still being written on the sand of Algerian beaches like this one — about 280 miles west of the capital, Algiers — by desperate young people trying to cross the Mediterranean in makeshift boats with secondhand engines.

“There are fewer leaving nowadays, but they still do,” Mr. Ouis said. Stories like his now serve as a kind of foreshadowing of the enormous surge in migration to Europe that has been propelled by conflicts elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.

“Ten years ago, we were eight on the raft,” Mr. Ouis recalled. “Five of us were arrested immediately upon arrival by the Spanish Guardia and sent back home. Another is still roaming the French cities. The last one disappeared. No one knows what happened to him.”

“I hid all night in a cave to avoid the Guardia,” he added, referring to the Spanish police, “then crossed all of Spain until I reached San Sebastián and the French border, stealing fruit from trees and picking lemons in one-day jobs.”

Mr. Ouis’s reasons for leaving Algeria were the same as many others’: a deep malaise stemming from economic stagnation and the general arbitrariness of government authority. Yet, like many others, he returned — of his own accord — after 10 years of roaming, occasional jobs as a builder or painter, and hopes and disenchantment. He had lived illegally in France all that time.

Exhausted and disillusioned, he sought out the Algerian Consulate in Marseille, France, which provided him with a document that allowed him to return home. He boarded a boat back to Algeria, a real ship this time, even though he was made to travel in its hold.

“You leave because you think Algeria is not your country; it mistreats you and doesn’t offer any prospects,” he said. “Then you arrive in France and realize it is not your country either. You live in uncertainty, alone and ostracized.”

When the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi stormed the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January, massacring many of the staff, the French news media rarely missed an opportunity to note the assailants’ Algerian origin, though they were born, raised and educated in France and held French passports.

In Algeria, however, what was most striking was that few here identified, defined or recognized the Kouachis as Algerian. Here, the Kouachis were French nationals, and their Algerian heritage was but a detail.

This circumstance, of not really being accepted in either country, is familiar to large numbers of French nationals of Algerian heritage, particularly from the second and third generations of emigrants.

“In the 14 years I have been here, I have never really been accepted, neither socially nor professionally,” said Sami Rahemi, who was born in Algeria, moved to France when he was 5 and returned to Algeria as an investor when he was 35. “Ever since I arrived in 1992, I have been called ‘the emigrant.’ I have always been defined by my migratory flow and never by what I am as a person. I had lived two years earlier in California, and everyone called me by my name there.”

Indeed, some French nationals of Algerian origin face open hostility during visits to their parents’ home country.

“I do not like les émigrés,” Abdelkader Lamali, a 23-year-old student in Algiers, said bluntly. “When they come here, they always complain about the dirty streets and all our flaws. When they come on vacation, they show off their euros and invade the very few tourist places we have, while they live off welfare in Europe.”

Yet in Europe, the reception can be equally cold.

“We know what we are not: French,” Karim Beghache, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan, said in an interview in the precarious housing projects of Saint-Denis, in the suburbs of Paris. “But we do not know what we are.”

“Here in France,” he added, “anti-Algerian racism is everywhere. Because of a group of feebleminded extremists, we have all been stigmatized. Imagine the white people in the U.S.A. being stigmatized because the K.K.K. exists.”

His friend Amine Benkerri, 37, who goes by the street name Kurse Wann, described what it meant to straddle two cultures and belong to neither.

“We were born to suffer,” he said. “In Algeria, I play dumb so no one can notice my French accent, and in France, they do not want us to find a way out from the projects we live in. Racism breeds revolt, which in turn accentuates racism. It’s a Catch-22.”

“They should put us on an island somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean,” Mr. Benkerri added, “right between France and Algeria, and leave us there.”