Letter to Périco Légasse, who wants to settle migrants in our countryside



Msir,

At the beginning of 2023, Emmanuel Macron intends to propose a bill “relating to asylum, therefore to immigration in the Republic”. And the first of us to specify (therefore to recognize…): “Our policy today is absurd because it consists in putting women and men who arrive, who are in the greatest misery, in the most poor. Before pleading “for a better distribution of foreigners welcomed on the territory, in rural areas, which are losing population”.

If I were on the left, I would applaud with both hands by approving this generous initiative decided, moreover, by the one who knows so well how to differentiate “those who are nothing” from those who are worth it. Yes, I would applaud with both hands and I would hasten to welcome in my guest room or in my small secondary residence (bobo left) those who will necessarily have to provide the table and the lodging.

If I were on the right, I would of course find the idea unacceptable and I would mention, in pettothe risks linked to insecurity, to the sudden usurpation of local jobs, to the impossibility of integrating these foreigners among rural people.

READ ALSOUnited States: when Republicans make migrants “travel”

Being (quite simply) from the countryside for nearly 59 years, I prefer to analyze this hypothesis with the eyes of those who are broken into rural subtleties. Because, by evoking “the rural spaces which are losing population”, the President of the Republic has implicitly recognized the abandonment of these isolated territories where no one wants to come to treat, invest, teach, trade or quite simply settle down and rest because there is not a single bar to telephone, no network to connect to, no more clinics to give birth, no more specialists to diagnose, no more peasants, craftsmen or industrialists to hire and since, confinement obliges, a certain government has pushed them to pack up shop, no more bistros to quench their thirst, no more restaurants to eat. The list is long of the causes and consequences that precipitated rural abandonment. And when I hear you, Mr. Périco Légasse, decree these days, from a Parisian recording studio: “It’s a great idea, we can allocate a piece of land and turn it into peasants. This is the future of our rural life”, I wonder what you mean by “plot of land” and I come to ask myself a few questions about your ability to be able to talk about, as you regularly do, the profession of ‘farmer.

This propensity to want to take care of other people’s business, to necessarily know what is good for them and to want to “play peasants” all the time begins to become painful. What do you know, sir, of the daily life of a farmer? This daily life that you idealize, this space that you “value”, without knowing what it costs to hold the tool, not for a few seconds in front of the cameras, but for a lifetime. What do you know of those loans that have to be repaid, even when the elements interfere, even when the market prices collapse, even when fate is hounding those harvests that never arrive. What do you know, gentlemen Légasse and Macron, of the vertigo that invades when filing for bankruptcy, what do you know of the distress that prevails when hail, frost, drought or rain destroy crops in a few moments? What do you know about this unfair competition which forces the French farmer, overwhelmed by environmental standards, to abdicate, because he no longer manages to keep his place on the market?

READ ALSOIn Vendée, operation a doctor for all

And you come to offer these poor people, as in the Middle Ages in the time of lords and squires, a piece of land or “rural spaces” in order to occupy them, in order to move them away from these urban centers and these suburbs where you no longer know how to curb misery and calm the claimant.

It’s disrespecting both those who might arrive and those who might welcome them. Because the rural world, and a fortiori its agriculture, is no longer able to provide either employment or the appropriate structures for those who have had to flee their country.

No, Monsieur Légasse, our countryside must not become this carpet where we will conceal the misery of the world because it will have become less visible than in Paris.

John Paul Pelras

*Jean-Paul Pelras is a writer, former agricultural trade unionist and journalist. Editor-in-chief of the newspaper The Agri Pyrénées-Orientales and Aude, he is the author of around twenty essays, short stories and novels, winner of the Mediterranean Roussillon prize for A murder for memory and the Alfred-Sauvy Prize for The Old Boy. His latest work, The Journalist and the Peasant, was published by Talaia editions in November 2018.




Source link -82