PARIS, April 20 – President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for reelection, wants to renegotiate the preferential immigration treaty with Algeria. Sarkozy’s anti-Algerian announcement in this week’s Express magazine is an electoral maneuver to appeal to right-wing voters, particularly supporters of the fascist National Front party. But Sarkozy’s Socialist rival, François Hollande, also says it’s necessary to reduce immigration to France from the current level of 180,000 people a year. (Le Nouvel Observateur article, 3/7)

Both Sarkozy and Hollande play to the racist idea that immigrants “steal jobs” from people born in France and thus worsen unemployment. In reality, unemployment is a built into capitalism (see Marx’s analysis below).

The 1968 treaty with Algeria has made it much easier for Algerians to obtain initial one-year and renewal 10-year residence permits than people of other nationalities.

Around 25,000 Algerians (the treaty limit) obtain residence permits each year. The Algerian immigrant community — around 578,000 — is France’s largest.

Sarkozy wants to renegotiate the treaty to make it as difficult for Algerians as for other nationalities to obtain a residence permit. The Algerian government indicated that it wants the treaty left as is. The French government may try to buy the Algerian bosses’ consent by offering development aid.

Karl Marx wrote in “Capital,” chapter 25, that, “It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labor out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of laborers...”

This means capitalists are continually pushed to introduce machinery (or speed up the pace of work) to make workers more productive, in order to squeeze more work out of fewer workers. The “excess” workers are laid off and form “a disposable industrial reserve army” of the unemployed. They are used as a threat to employed workers to refrain from making demands and to accept give-backs or they will be replaced by the jobless.

Anti-immigrant racism divides the working class in France and weakens it in its struggle against the capitalist class. When Hollande and Sarkozy build racism in an attempt to win votes, they do the capitalist class a big favor.