France's hotel immigrants

Craig S. Smith:

The fire at the Paris Opéra hotel on Friday, which claimed 24 lives and left dozens injured, started with a drunken, drug-laced party held by the night watchman and several friends, the Justice Ministry and survivors of the fire said Tuesday. It spread quickly up the hotel's only staircase, trapping some people in windowless rooms.

But the tragedy has thrown light on more than the uncertain safety of the cramped one-star hotels that dot this city. It has also illuminated a dim corner of Europe's broader illegal immigration debate: what to do with the Continent's swelling tide of undocumented aliens, known in France as "sans papiers."

The hotel was part of a circuit of low-end lodgings contracted by government-financed agencies to house asylum seekers or aliens whose requests for residency had been denied.

"As they have no legal status and we have to put them somewhere, we put them in hotels while they are waiting for a permanent solution," said Xavier Emmanuelli, who heads the quasi-governmental agency SAMU Social.

Aicha Alouache, 40, is part of that netherworld. Looking like a middle-class housewife, with neatly coiffed hair and faux pearl earrings, she said she and her husband had moved to France from Algeria three years ago "to live better."

Her family has moved through nearly 10 different hotels since then. "There are times when it's time to go home and I have to think, 'Where do I live?' " she said, sitting outside yet another hotel.

Ms. Alouache said her asylum request was refused last year and is pending appeal. She is angry that she still has no papers, but she said she was not about to go back to Algiers. Here, her son, Mohamed, 4, attends a public nursery school, and her family gets 100 euros a month, as well as food, clothing, housing and free medical care from the state.

Until the fire, she spent her days in city parks with friends, waiting for her son to get out of school while her husband, 42, played soccer and acted as an informal coach for boys. She and her husband are not allowed to work, but many illegal immigrants do.

Like most European countries, France rarely resorts to deportation, so people like Ms. Alouache hang on, often for years.

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