On a cold January morning on the Boulevard de Sébastopol in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, four young African men in puffer coats are posted hoods-up at the four corners of the crossroads with the Boulevard Saint-Martin. Sentries for drug dealers, they scan the commuters emerging from the Métro and the McDonald’s, watch the alternating flows of traffic for police cars, and rub their hands for warmth. Down the boulevard by the Café Central, a transgender Asian prostitute leans against a boarded-up pharmacy in leather boots and a dirty COVID mask. Across the road, a knot of elderly African men in ill-fitting overcoats stamp their feet as they smoke the first cigarette of the day in the boules park before La Gaîté Lyrique theater.
A young African man peers around the theater doors and then slips outside. Wearing only low-slung jeans and a torn white T-shirt, he shivers as he leans against the arched doorway. Another young African man sidles up and along the front steps. They shake hands and exchange a roll of euros for a small package. One sidles away, and the other slips back indoors. The young mothers crossing the square with their toddlers keep the children to the far side and their eyes straight ahead. The necessary accommodations to life in Europe today.
The Gaîté Lyrique opened in 1862. The grands boulevards were still new, and the gilded neoclassicism of the Second Empire style was in vogue. Jacques Offenbach, the soundtracker of the Second Empire who is usually remembered for Tales of Hoffmann, managed the Gaîté Lyrique for a couple of years in the 1870s. He revived his Orpheus in the Underworld here but went bust after risking the profits on La Haine (Hatred), a new operetta on recent political history. The opera was not revived until 2009, but in 1995, the director Mathieu Kassovitz reused its title. Kassovitz’s La Haine is about small-time immigrant criminals in the banlieues, the housing estates that ring old Paris, and police violence. The film made such an impact that the then-prime minister, Alain Juppé, organized a special screening.
The third is one of those inner-city areas that combine respectability, squalor, and regeneration on the same block. Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes performed here in the 1920s. Offenbach’s massive chandelier vanished during the German occupation.
The Gaîté Lyrique declined into a circus school in the 1970s and then the Magic Planet amusement park before closing in the 1990s. The municipality bought its derelict ruins, stopped the domed roof from collapsing, and turned it into a municipal arts center in 2011. It has hosted concerts by Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Christine and the Queens (who are big in France and should be better known outside it). Jean Paul Gaultier’s offices are just around the corner. The theater has 9,500 square meters of space across five floors, three auditoriums, a 100-station library, and the prospect of bankruptcy because it has been taken over by around 350 illegal immigrants from West Africa and a left-wing collective who do their shopping for them.
Protest theater
One of Gaîté Lyrique’s long-running projects, “The Factory of Our Times,” aims to “support a new generation of talents, break down barriers between practices and audiences, and build new narratives on a European scale” with “artists, activists, thinkers, and changemakers.”
In this spirit of taxpayer-funded openness and creativity, the theater hosted a free conference on Dec. 10, 2024, about “reinventing the refugee welcome in France.” The usual suspects, academics and NGO types, trod the boards and retrod the usual themes.
About 200 migrants turned up for the conference. When the show was over, they refused to leave. They had been brought there by an antifa-style group calling itself the Belleville Park Youth Collective. They named themselves after the location of an Occupy-style tent city they built in Belleville. Most of the migrants claimed to be under 18 years of age. French law obliges local authorities to find the necessary accommodations. But the authorities judged them to be adults. The shelters are already full, so they had been sleeping rough in the winter.
The theater management had called for “reinventing the refugee welcome.” It could hardly complain now. The socialist city council was unwilling to expose itself as bourgeois by asserting its rights, especially against Africans who claimed to be unaccompanied children. The migrants stayed. The Youth Collective collectively annexed the Gaîté Lyrique for its “anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle” and prevented reporters from entering.
The theater cannot sell any tickets and cannot pay its staff’s wages, but the show must go on. Each evening, the migrants troop out onto the steps, where they bang drums and chant into megaphones. When their slogans are not classically French (“We’re fed up with the police! We want liberté, egalité, fraternité!”), they are as derivative of American models as a Johnny Hallyday tune. “We’re all equal, not illegal” is the Gallic equivalent of the blue-state lawn sign, “No human is illegal.” It looks and sounds like a command performance. The white saviors of the Youth Collective are getting the Africans to do their work for them. This division of labor is not the only part of the anti-colonial struggle that looks much like the colonial one.
As I watch a second drug deal taking place behind the shed where the municipal gardeners keep their tools, a pasty, multiply pierced young woman marches from the theater wearing head-to-toe black and an expression of bitter sanctimony. She bounces a supermarket basket on wheels down the steps and crosses the boulevard to the Franprix minimart. When she returns to the theater a few minutes later, the migrant men do not help her haul the full basket up the steps. Actors must rest between performances.
They do, however, get in character when I start taking photos with my phone. I duck into the adjoining Bistro de la Gaîté. “I can’t talk about it anymore,” says Elia, the manager, putting both her hands on her stomach. “It’s giving me a pain here.” Elia is of Algerian background, and her husband is from Mali. She has three children, six employees, and no customers. The migrants fight and smoke marijuana in the park. Women avoid the area. I imagine Jean Paul Gaultier takes the long way around, too.
In the Olympic summer of 2024, the Belleville Park collective managed the migrant occupation of the Maison des Métallos, a cultural center in the 11th arrondissement. The city council surrendered and found accommodation for hundreds of them. The further the migrants get into the system, the less likely it is they will be expelled. There are no “illegal immigrants” in European law, only “irregular migrants” and “asylum-seekers.” They are entitled to due process. An army of nongovernmental organizations, many of them taxpayer-funded, will guide them through it, make the necessary adjustments to their status, and find them accommodation.
None of the men I saw at the Gaîté Lyrique looked like he was under 18 years of age. Their passports are probably at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The only woman I saw was the white activist making the supermarket run. The Gaîté Lyrique really is a “factory for our times.”
At Café Central, unshaven workers in denim caps stand at the bar and sink the first rosé of the day while first-time tourists pay triple prices for table service on the street. Outside, an African panhandler moves onto the prostitute’s turf. She shifts a few doors down: another necessary accommodation. A Porsche roars up from the side street. A burly, shaven-headed Arab, her pimp or dealer, climbs out, and they go upstairs.
A group of Africans from the Gaîté Lyrique work their cellphones as they walk to the Métro. A siren sounds and everyone freezes. Two carloads of police have busted a white man for running a light. Two policemen check his documents and ticket him, while another pair direct the backed-up traffic around his car and theirs. The Africans walk past the police, eyes down, and the police ignore them. It is lunchtime. Three schoolchildren eat their sandwiches on a bench on the far side of the square as the drug dealers go in and out of the theater.
The American exception
A few days after I saw the French farce at the Gaîté Lyrique, President Donald Trump took office. On his first day, he issued 10 executive orders and proclamations that amount to the transformation of U.S. immigration policy and enforcement. The CBP One app, which the Biden administration created to smooth the entry of illegal immigrants at the southern border, suddenly stopped working. “Deportation flights have begun,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Jan. 24 as she released photographs of illegal immigrants being marched onto a military aircraft in handcuffs at a base in El Paso, Texas. While news channels screened footage of weeping women at the border, the deported, Leavitt said, included a suspected terrorist, four members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, and several men who had been convicted of sex crimes against children.
The American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.C.-based NGO that advises lawyers on how to use the immigration system, called Trump’s rulings “an effort to redefine America.” They may “radically change the face of legal immigration to the U.S.” Uncertainty over their implementation may even “throw into question the future of asylum as laid out in the Refugee Act of 1980.”
The American Immigration Council is in the business of exploiting the immigration system as it currently stands. A majority of Americans, however, support Trump’s policies — which is to say they want the immigration system to change. A Gallup poll taken in July 2024 found that 88% of Republicans and 50% of independents want to reduce immigration. These numbers were at a historic low during Trump’s first term, but under the Biden administration, they surged to a level last seen in 2001, when the post-9/11 security panic combined with an inrush of migrants to California.
The overall percentage who supported deporting all illegal immigrants to their countries of origin rose from 37% in 2019 to 47% in 2024. Support for allowing illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. to become naturalized citizens “if they meet certain requirements over a period of time” fell from 81% in 2019 to 70% in 2024. Support for immigration restrictions rose among Democrats, too. In 2023, 40% of Democrats wanted to increase immigration, and 18% wanted to decrease it. A year later, 26% wanted to increase immigration, and 28% wanted to decrease it. Overall, 56% of Americans want to reduce immigration.
These figures suggest that Trump’s second-term immigration policies are pushing at an open door in the way of his first-term economic policies. Those began with partisan outrage from the Democrats, but by 2020, Joe Biden was running on a Trump-lite economic program. A public consensus has already formed on immigration. Its nuances are clear. Polls show support for tighter enforcement against obvious criminality and blatant exploitation such as “anchor baby” citizenship, but also compassion for the American-born, American-raised children of illegal immigrants. December’s intra-Republican online fracas over H-1B visas is one way of turning aspirations into policies.
European publics are no less opposed to continuing current immigration policies. A February 2024 Ipsos survey found that only 40% of Britons thought that mass immigration has had a “positive effect” on their society. A majority, 52%, wanted to reduce immigration, and 69% were dissatisfied with a Conservative government that had repeatedly promised to reduce immigration while presiding over a historic increase. That dissatisfaction split the right-wing vote in the July 2024 elections, handing Labour a victory.
Since then, however, Labour’s failure to stem illegal immigration across the English Channel has been a key factor in its rapid collapse in the polls. On Jan. 24, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which takes a Trumpish line on immigration, topped the polls for the first time. The notorious “Trump effect” cannot be discounted in the British case. Nor can the public shaming of Britain’s established parties, and nor can Elon Musk’s outraged tweeting at how Britain’s established parties and its decaying institutions suppressed the Pakistani rape gangs scandal. But Reform’s rise, and the success of New Right parties across Europe, has been a long-term trend, at times running ahead of American politics. And Britain, which has a left-wing government whose leader refused on Jan. 29 to put a cap on immigration, is an outlier.
Vibe shift
In 2019, Denmark’s prime minister broke taboos by saying he wanted “zero asylum-seekers” and returned 1,200 Syrians to their country. In January 2024, France’s National Assembly would pass an immigration bill making it possible to deport foreign nationals if they were convicted of serious crimes and constituted a “grave threat” to public order. “The Republic will never have had a law as tough as this,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told reporters.
In November 2024, Sweden, whose welfare agencies and police had been overwhelmed by immigrant-related crime, achieved reverse net migration, with more people leaving the country than coming in. The Swedes managed this by doubling the minimum salary requirement for legal immigrants, increasing the number of deportations, and reducing the allocation for asylum-seekers.
The Germans are more sensitive to taboos than any other Europeans. Germany also has the casting vote on European Union policy. Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrat-led minority government is set to lose power in February’s federal elections. On Jan. 29, the German parliament broke the Brandmauer, the “firewall” between the allegedly responsible established parties and the New Right insurgents of Alternative for Germany, who are running second in the polls.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union and the likely chancellor of the next government, publicly sought Alternative for Germany’s support for his proposals for immigration restriction. It was, Merz said, “indisputably necessary” to act, regardless of the AfD’s extremist past. The alternative was “continuing to watch helplessly as people in our country are threatened, injured, and murdered” by illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers. Merz’s proposals include turning asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants away at Germany’s borders. The Social Democrats and the Greens claimed this would breach both German and EU law. The parliament passed the proposal regardless. “The so-called firewall is an anti-democratic cartel,” AfD’s leader Alice Weidel said after the vote. Merz’s proposals, she said, were “copied from us.”
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Trump’s immigration policies are part of a wider zeitgeist. The online Hegelians of the Right call it the “vibe shift.” As Europe catches a cold when the American economy sneezes, so American leadership will shift the Overton window of acceptable speech and action, encouraging European governments to pass further legislation — and even make hardheaded use of the soft power on which they pride themselves.
As Europe struggles to contain cross-Mediterranean immigration, its leaders will have noticed what happened when Colombian President Gustavo Petro blocked the use of military planes for deportation flights. Trump threatened Colombia with a 25% tariff on Colombian imports, to be raised to 50% after one week, as well as revocation of visas for Colombian diplomats and their relatives. Petro caved and even offered his presidential plane. This, too, was a necessary accommodation to reality.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
