People of Algerian descent in France contemplate crossing the Mediterranean for a one-way trip away from racism

Souad is preparing to move to Algiers in a few months. The 45-year-old French-Algerian woman, a legal assistant living in Lyon, has chosen her parents’ country to start a new life with her 12-year-old son.

“The bad atmosphere in France is pushing me towards the exit a little,” she told Middle East Eye.

“Like all children of immigrants, I have always experienced racism and discrimination, but it was not on the same scale as today. It’s becoming relentless,” she added.

Souad said she no longer wanted to live “in a society that rejects” her.

“I’ve reached a point where I don’t find it normal anymore. I’m fed up.”

On social media, other Algerians born or raised in France, mostly young but sometimes elderly, both women and men, married or single, with children or not, are showing the same desire to cross the Mediterranean for a one-way trip.

They exchange ideas in Facebook groups such as “Make a successful hijra [migration, exile] to Algeria” or “Return to live in Algeria”, where, like Souad, they criticize the rise in racism and Islamophobia in France.

In February, the Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin indicated that anti-Muslim acts had increased by 30 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.

Out of the 242 acts recorded, more than half were committed in the last three months of 2023, the minister specified, seeing a link with the start of the Israeli war on Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October.

“When we were little and my father took us to Algeria for the holidays in El Kseur, near Bejaia [in Kabilya, 220 km east of Algiers], he never stopped praising the beauty of the country,” Bachir, a 33-year-old French-Algerian truck driver from the northern city of Roubaix, told MEE.

His father secretly nurtured the dream of acquiring a pied-a-terre where the family could all live forever, Bachir said. But his project never became reality. As a warehouse worker, he barely earned enough to meet their needs.

Today, Bachir has decided to take the plunge himself with his own family.

“I am taking exactly the same path as my father 40 years ago, but in the opposite direction,” he said jokingly, before pointing to a climate of hatred against foreigners and Muslims that makes France “unlivable”.

“I want my two daughters to grow up in a society that does not push them to the margins because of their name, their skin color and their religion,” he said.

“My wish is that we can, as a family, practice our faith freely, without being accused of being separatists and Salafists,” he added, in reference to a 2021 law pushed forward by President Emmanuel Macron to fight “Islamist separatism” and accused of being discriminatory against Muslims.

Boussad, a mathematics teacher in a Paris high school says: “I no longer feel at home in France. Despite my studies and my long career in teaching, I am constantly brought back to my origins… Racism has become uninhibited. It is unleashed all day long on television screens.”

Officially, there are no statistics about the number of French-Algerians who have chosen Algeria as their country of residence.

These “returns” can also seem marginal compared to the scale of the phenomenon of Algerian migration towards Europe.

Source: The Middle East Eye