Cities and the unevenness of social movement space: the case of France's immigrant rights movement

Environment and Planning A 2011, volume 43, pages 1655 ^ 1673 doi:10.1068/a43564 Cities and the unevenness of social movement space: the case of France's immigrant rights movement Walter Nicholls Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, Amsterdam 1012, DK, The Netherlands; e-mail: w.j.nicholls@uva.nl Received 3 December 2010; in revised form 15 March 2011 Abstract. This paper analyzes the formation of a `social movement space' through the case of France's immigrant rights movement. Rather than this movement developing on the head of a pin, the French immigrant rights movement displays a rich and varied geography that changed over time. The movement emerged through a series of urban struggles and Paris early on became a center of these mobilizations. The complex and empowering networks developed in Paris were later deployed in a new campaign to contest restrictive national legislation passed in 1993. As this movement shifted from the urban to the national scale, networks connected the Paris hub to local struggles across the country. This network configuration, with Paris playing a centralizing role, introduced powerful geographical cleavages between center and periphery. Thus, this movement is not only conceived as a form of contentious collective action but as a distinctive spatial entity in its own right (`social movement space'). As a spatial entity, the paper examines the processes that intersected to provide it with its own unique features, the capacities to sustain its political momentum, and the internal cleavages that would later result in its slow demise. 1 Introduction This paper examines the geography of social movements through a study of France's immigrant rights movement. Though this movement dates from the 1970s to the present, the paper focuses on the cycle of mobilization between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s. The development of the movement was associated with several spatial forms and processes: First, early in the mobilization cycle, aggrieved immigrants mobilized against restrictive urban policies and by doing this, transformed the locality into the most strategic arena for making rights claims. Second, through these urban struggles, Paris-based immigrants and French activists developed powerful activist networks and employed these networks to call national attention to the plight of immigrants in French cities. Third, powerful activist networks built up during the `urban' phase of the struggle were then deployed to a new campaign against national immigration laws following 1993. Fourth, Parisian activists employed the infrastructure of their national associations to build a network connecting the different localities across the country. The concentration of powerful resources among Parisian activists allowed them to play an enhanced role in the network, but the resulting spatial unevenness of this network produced conflicts along center ^ periphery lines. Drawing on the geography of social movement literature (Leitner et al, 2008; Miller, 2000; Nicholls, 2009; Routledge, 2003), I maintain that this movement (like all movements) did not unfold on the head of a pin (Miller, 2000) and displayed a spatial structure and dynamics that changed as it progressed in time. This movement is therefore conceived as a concrete spatial entity in motion (`a social movement space'): it is centered in strategic cities, connected and sustained through extensive networks, and achieves coherence within a distinctive geopolitical field. However, to stay in motion, it has had to build upon the relational advantages of the center at the expense of multiple peripheries, introducing internal unevenness and conflicts which threaten its abilities to sustain itself over time. 1656 W Nicholls The next section provides the reader with a review of the literature and, following this, lays out a theory to explain the uneven space of the immigrant rights movement. The sections that follow examine how the movement became grounded in the urban arena and spread unevenly beyond the city walls. The study is based on twenty-seven semi-structured interviews and archives from three organizations participating in the social movement network. The paper employs the following technique to cite documents from the archives: The first letter inside the parenthesis stands for the type of document used: `M' stands for minutes, and `T' for political tract. The subsequent letters stand for the name of the organization: for example, M-FASTI 4.1.94 means that the information was taken from the organization FASTI's minutes on April 1, 1994. 2 Cities and the geography of immigrant social movements: 2.1 Spatial processes and contentious politics The last fifteen years have witnessed an important growth in the geography of social movements literature. This literature has shown how social movements are constituted by various `spatialities' (ie, place, scale, or networks), with each spatiality playing different yet overlapping roles for social movements (Leitner et al, 2008; Miller, 2000; 2001). `Place' has been conceived as sites that facilitate the formation of strong and meaningful relations between different people. Social and cultural interactions unfold in particular geographical sites, producing common worldviews and powerful solidarities between people (Coleman, 1988; Gould, 1995; Nicholls, 2008; Oslender, 2004; Routledge, 1997). Moreover, activists draw on the common symbolic repertoire found in places to assemble mobilizing frames and harness collective emotions (Bosco, 2006; Martin, 2003; Miller, 2000). By contributing to the production of solidarity networks and mobilizing frames, `place' makes it possible for marginalized people to contribute scarce resources to high-risk political movements. The modern state, as a power structure with its own distinctive scalar logic, has organized itself at national and increasingly transnational scales [Brenner (2004), Castells (1996), Jessop (2002); for a historical account, see Mann (1993)]. Lower level state institutions (ie, regions, municipalities, and neighborhoods) have played roles as centers of policy innovation and as sites for adapting general rules to particular contextual circumstances (Le Gale©s, 2002; Uitermark, 2005). As sites where rules are unevenly applied and rights unequally distributed, local institutions are important arenas where people experience everyday injustices in the most visceral terms. People develop their political grievances through these institutional spaces and direct their claims for justice at the agencies and personalities immediately responsible for their problems (Castells, 1983). While the organization of the modern state can channel aggrieved activists into thousands of particularistic battles, activists can overcome `local traps' by connecting to activists in other localities and operating at regional, national, and transnational scales. Through these connections, activists learn about their commonalities with other aggrieved people (there is a broader pattern of injustice which goes beyond their locality) and discover the political opportunities that extend beyond their localities (Herod, 2001; Sikkink, 2005; Tarrow and McAdam, 2005). Poststructural geographers have stressed that power is not concentrated in a core structure and distributed downward through a neatly nested scalar division of labor (Marston et al, 2005; Massey, 2004; 2005). Power is dispersed across a range of different sites in a decentered network, with powerful actors in each site maintaining order by penetrating and rationalizing the lived spaces of people. If power is diffuse and decentered, so too is resistance (Featherstone, 2003; McFarlane, 2009; Routledge, 2003). Resistances are expressed in different sites as localized assemblages of people, Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1657 organizations, and resources in battles against these powers (McFarlane, 2009, page 562). Rather than dismiss these local struggles as particularistic and fragmented battles, these local sites are always connected to other resistances through a variety of extralocal networks. Local resistances therefore produce powerful effects even when they do not formally `scale' up into more centralized movements. The growing prominence of this network approach has resulted in efforts to identify the ways in which networks are coimplicated with other spatialities like place, territory, and scale (Jessop et al, 2008; Leitner et al, 2008). Leitner and her colleagues (2008) in particular argue that human beings are positioned in multiple spatialities simultaneously and that choices concerning their strategies reflect the interplay of these spatialities. Using the case of the Immigrant Workers' Freedom Ride in the United States, they show how mobility and translocal networks were instrumental in circulating alternative imaginaries and catalyzing a series of locally situated but nationally connected immigrant rights coalitions. The theoretical task at hand is therefore not to demonstrate which spatiality is more important than another but rather to identify how these distinctive spatialities play different but overlapping roles in actual social movements. The strategy described above will be used to analyze the complex geographies of France's immigrant rights movement. In particular, I maintain that the processes highlighted above have contributed to constituting a rather distinctive spatial entity that elsewhere I have called a ``social movement space'' (Nicholls, 2009). Such a space is grounded politically and relationally in certain cities; it is sustained through geographically intensive and extensive activist networks; and the modalities of collective actions are conditioned by the geographical organization of the political field. Just as any other spatial structure, the social movement has its own internal logic of motion which powers it forward through the political field. However, that which gives the movement its force (the concentration of power in central places) also plants the seed of its own demise by introducing geographically uneven power relations that exacerbate exiting class, gender, ethnic, and ideological cleavages. 2.2 The uneven space of immigrant rights movements: four processes This section outlines four generic processes that influence the spatial structure and dynamics of immigrant rights movements. Though we see these processes play out in many immigrant rights movements, they emerge in different ways, at different times, and intersect with one another in widely varying ways according to local and national immigration patterns, cultures, and politics. 2.2.1 Scaling immigration policies and localizing immigrant grievances In this section I maintain that scalar processes within the state's immigration apparatus have made localities into spaces for generating grievances amongst immigrants. The recent immigration literature has demonstrated that immigration regulations are produced and executed unevenly across three geopolitical scales. In the postwar period transnational agreements, treaties, courts, and agencies assumed greater authority in this domain and have extended their reach into the protection of immigrant rights (Castles and Miller, 2003; Joppke, 1999; Leitner, 1997). These transnational institutions and agencies have not only helped define common norms regarding the rights of immigrants but they have also created enforcement mechanisms to encourage nation-states to abide by such norms (Joppke, 1999). National policy makers are uncomfortably positioned between voters seeking more restrictive measures and international agreements, national courts, and various interest groups (employers groups, unions, rights advocates, etc) pushing for liberalization (Joppke, 1999). 1658 W Nicholls In this context the local scale plays a unique and strategic role. Shifting some responsibility over immigration to local institutions provides central governments with more flexibility in the face of xenophobic constituents and the continued importance of liberal constraints. On the one hand, national governments may enact restrictive policies in response to voter pressures but devolving some powers to local officials allows them to employ their discretion in how national policies should be enforced and implemented (Garbaye, 2005; Ireland, 1994; Lipsky, 1980; Menj|¨ var, 2006). This permits states to allow some flexibility in assessing the particularities of different cases in the face of growing legal restrictions. On the other hand, central governments may also seek to obfuscate illiberal restrictions or deflect controversial measures by shifting responsibilities to localities. For example, national and international courts may require a government to guarantee religious freedoms but a mosque construction may also catalyze strong opposition from xenophobic natives. Facing these conflicting pressures, the national government can deflect the issue to the local arena by arguing that new building constructions, including mosques, fall under the zoning remit of municipal authorities (Bowen, 2007; Maussen, 2009). Restricting the construction of a mosque can therefore be justified on the basis of violating local zoning ordinances. In this instance, downscaling this issue would provide the state with the flexibility to limit the rights of religious minorities (satisfying xenophobes) without overtly violating the constitution or international agreements on religious freedoms. In addition to gaining flexibility, shifting policy responsibilities to localities can provide the central state with a firewall against aggrieved activists. As the immediate sources of grievances are local institutions and agencies (planning agencies, housing corporations, mayor's office, etc), immigrant rights activists are more likely to target local officials with their claims than the central government. Thus, the locality does not only serve to provide the national government with enhanced flexibility but it also serves to channel grievances away from central organs of power. The more states downscale policy responsibilities to localities, the more localities become a central terrain of contentious struggles. 2.2.2 Concentrating people, organizations, and opportunities in cities The localization of immigration policies transforms all local institutions into potential targets of aggrieved migrants. However, cities with higher concentrations of immigrants, supportive organizations, and political opportunities provide a more fertile environment for immigrant rights mobilizations than other settlements. Larger citiesöespecially those with growing postindustrial economies öcontain more economic opportunities for immigrant workers and ethnic entrepreneurs (Light, 2004; Portes et al, 1999; Samers, 2002; Sassen, 1995). As large numbers are pulled into these places, the emergence of stable family and friendship networks help draw in additional people through the process of `chain migration'. Once settled, large numbers of networked immigrants facing similar government restrictions talk to one another about the troubles posed by these restrictions. This transforms what may have been viewed as personal legal problems into collective grievances. In addition to numbers, larger cities also contain a wide diversity of organizations and associations that can provide direct and indirect support to immigrant communities. Labor unions, rights associations, religious organizations, and legal support groups among others may adjust existing programs to address the specific legal, economic, and cultural situations of immigrants. Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1659 2.2.3 Networking in places: making cities into centers of struggle Although the concentration of immigrants and organizational densities are necessary conditions for making cities into important sites of rights movements, such concentrations are by no means sufficient for enhanced political power (Garbaye, 2005; Ireland, 1994; Katznelson, 1973; Uitermark, 2010). High concentrations of immigrants and organizations are important but interorganizational networks play the crucial role of assembling people, organizations, and resources into actual collective mobilizations (Nicholls, 2008; Tillie, 2004). Elsewhere (Nicholls, 2008) I have provided a theoretical model to explain how networks can transform some cities (but certainly not all ) into powerful centers of mobilization. First, proximity and some geographic stability enable the development of strong relations between activists with similar interests. Strong ties between these activists contribute to generating trust and know-how (Coleman, 1988; Storper, 1997). While trust enables a group of activists to contribute their valuable resources (time, money, equipment, cultural and symbolic capital, etc) to high-risk ventures, know-how provides these activists with the knowledge and skills to deploy their resources in effective ways. Second, the diverse issues and grievances in cities result in many different activist clusters operating alongside one another. Such clusters can include first-generation immigrant associations, human rights activists, labor activists, and radical squatters among many others. The trust and know-how cultivated within each of these clusters provides each with heightened mobilization capacities in their areas of specialization. Third, immigrant grievances arising in cities cut across issue areas, catalyzing connections between specialized activist clusters. Immigrantrelated policies are carried out in areas such as zoning, housing, school, economic development, and transit. These policies can produce grievances among immigrants but also among activists with specialized experience in these policy areas. Immigrant activists employ `brokers' to gain the support of other activists who specialize in these policy areas. As alliances across activist clusters emerge and fade over time in the same city, a web of networks is created between the diverse activists in the city. This web of weak-tie relations provides information about extremely complex political fields and it provides immigrant activists a broad range of brokers to draw on to expand their network of supporters in different campaigns. While these complex activist networks may develop in some cities over time, political elites and institutions may develop effective `divide-and-rule' techniques to block their development in other cities (Garbaye, 2005; Nicholls, 2008; Sites, 2007; Uitermark, 2010). Thus, those relatively few cities with well-developed activist networks are more likely to assemble the immigrants, organizations, and resources in their cities in powerful social movement campaigns. 2.2.4 Networking across places: assembling an uneven social movement space Immigrant rights struggles often begin and coalesce in cities but they do not necessarily stay there. When new laws and regulations are introduced by the central state, activists within urban networks can shift their targets from local authorities to national officials and broaden their networks across people, organizations, and localities (Leitner et al, 2008; Miller, 2000; Nicholls, 2009; Tarrow and McAdam, 2005). Shifting urban-based networks to the national scale is achieved through loosely structured information networks like the Internet, and through the brokering work of activists within national organizations (Mann, 1993; Tarrow and McAdam, 2005). With respect to the latter, participants of urban-based activist hubs may belong to national organizations like unions or nongovernmental organizations. In certain instances, these activists can employ the national (and sometimes transnational) infrastructure and networks of these organizations to extend battles beyond their cities. 1660 W Nicholls For example, union participants within an urban activist hub can lobby their national federation to use its infrastructure and networks in support of a national immigrant rights campaign. The national organization serves as a broker because it connects activists situated in core urban centers like Los Angeles or Paris to local activists across the country. Once activists in different localities connect to one another, the infrastructure of the national organization can also be used as communication channels that ensure the normal exchange of ideas, discourses, and claims between various localities. The circulation of discourses provides a certain degree of coherence while also allowing locally situated activists to `imagine' themselves as part of a larger community engaged in a moral struggle for justice and equality. Localities are connected through networks but networks are not necessarily as decentered as poststructural geographers suggest. Activists in powerful cities possess heightened capacities to pool their tangible and intangible resources. This provides them with greater access to money, intellectual and cultural capital, legal expertise, and political influence within the field of immigration politics. In addition to this, their experience of engaging in immigration struggles provides them with the collective `know-how' to create the strategies and discourses that provide the movement with direction, coherence, and meaning. The concentration of knowledge and resources makes these cities into central hubs of national movement networks, with activists asserting enhanced influence over the whole network. The geographically uneven character of these movements introduces important cleavages between different localities. Activists in peripheral localities oftentimes face greater risks because they operate in less supportive political, social, and cultural environments. In spite of these greater risks, leaders in central hubs typically reap most of the benefits of national campaigns because they are in a better position to capture and concentrate inflows of financial resources, media exposure, and political capital. Thus, the unevenness of this social movement space results in potentially destabilizing `distributional conflicts' between actors positioned in central hub(s) of the movement and those situated within the multiple peripheries. ^ ^ ^ The discussion below describes how these four general processes combined in unique ways to shape the spatial structure and dynamics of France's immigrant rights movement. 3 Localizing immigration politics 3.1 Downscaling immigration policy and localizing grievances The French postwar state shifted important responsibilities over the execution of national immigration policies to local government agencies. First, in the postwar years, making and implementing immigration policy has been based on a two-level system (Hayward and Wright, 2002). At one level, the Minister of Interior and the National Assembly retained the authority to introduce legislation, design decrees to modify existing legislation, and provide specific instructions on how to implement national laws and decrees. At another level, government-appointed department prefects were charged with implementing national laws and reviewing applications for residency visas on a case-by-case basis. The Minister of Interior provided all prefects with general instructions for executing government policies, but the prefects were given discretion over how these policies should be implemented. This introduced flexibility in France's highly centralized state, with each department prefect able to make decisions on the basis of local circumstances and individual cases (Gaudin, 1999; Hayward and Wright, 2002). The autonomy and flexibility of prefects made the department an important target of aggravated grievances and turned each Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1661 of France's ninety-five prefectures into a potential site of immigrant rights struggle (Blin, 2005; Simëant, 1998). Second, housing was early on a key policy instrument to regulate immigrant flows and settlement patterns in the country. In the 1960s a semipublic housing agency (National Society for the Construction of Housing for Workers SONACOTRA (1) ) assumed responsibility for providing housing to ``temporary male migrants'' (Heins, 1991). Providing housing to this target population group was intended to block the migration of families and produce a population of migrants (ie temporary, male, and nonreproductive) that could be monitored and disciplined by SONACOTRA staff (Hmed, 2007). The use of housing took on additional importance in the 1970s. The government responded to the economic crisis by introducing strict restrictions on labor and family migration in 1973. However, France's Constitutional Council ruled that restrictions on family migration violated international law. Though the Minister of Interior was compelled to formally recognize the right of family reunification, he also introduced covert restrictions by adding a long list of criteria to qualify for family visas. Among other things, the head of the family had to present a certificate of `decent housing' issued by the mayor in the application packet. Facing tight housing markets and reluctant mayors, many families were denied their right to enter the country. This prompted many families to enter the country without residency visas and settle in dilapidated hotels or abandoned buildings, making it more difficult to obtain the certificate of decent housing. Housing restrictions therefore denied thousands of families the right to live together and condemned them to an `illegal' life on the margins of urban society. ``For immigrants, housing takes on a dimension that it simply does not have for French families. It affects the right to live as a family and to obtain papers for the family which are in order'' (Pëchu, 1999, page 734). 3.2 Concentrating immigrants and resources in Paris Though the spatial architecture of the state made all localities across France potential sites of immigrant struggles, the uneven concentrations of aggrieved immigrants and resources meant that some localities became more amenable to these struggles than others. By 1999 immigrants accounted for 7.8% of the national population, but the population was unevenly distributed across the country. Immigrants accounted for 1% of residents in rural municipalities, 3% of residents in medium-sized cities, 8% of larger cities (200 000 or more), and 14.7% of the capital region of Iê le-de-France (Boe«ldieu and Borrel, 2000). By 1999, while 18.3% of the whole French population resided in the Iê le-de-France, 38% of all immigrants resided in the same region. The eastern region of Rhoªne-Alpes (with the city of Lyon) and the southeastern region of Provence-AlpesCoªte d'Azur (with the city of Marseilles) were also important immigration poles, each containing 11% and 10%, respectively, of the country's total immigrant population. National immigrant groups have also been distributed unevenly across the country, with sub-Saharan Africans being particularly drawn to the national capital (60% in the Iê le-de-France region) (Boe«ldieu and Borrel, 2000). Paris distinguished itself from other cities not only because of the disproportionate concentration of immigrants, but also because it concentrated organizational resources. Many West African immigrants were drawn from compact regions within Mali and Senegal (Pëchu, 1999; 2004; Simëant, 1998). The thick family and friendship ties were used to reconstruct solidarity networks in Paris and its suburbs. These networks combined with emerging ethnic associations to form the foundations of a robust (1) Sociëtë nationale de construction de logements pour les travailleurs (National Society for Housing Construction for Workers). 1662 W Nicholls `organizational infrastructure' for Paris's West African community. Pëchu argues that this infrastructure played a key role in diffusing important information to members of the community, including information concerning government policies and restrictions, decisions made by the prefect and mayor, and various advocacy and support groups that provided immigrants with assistance. As the Paris region had the highest concentration of these immigrants, their distinctive networks and organizational resources were most concentrated there as well. These resources permitted these immigrants to `think' and `act' collectively when the opportunities presented themselves (Pëchu, 1999). In addition to the organizational resources of West African immigrants, the headquarters of the country's leading human rights and antiracist associations were also located within three districts (arrondissements) of northeastern Paris (FASTI, LDH, GISTI, MRAP,(2) SOS Racisme). For most of these associations, proximity to influential political leaders and strategic organizations (advocacy groups, unions, lawyers' guilds, media personalities, left-wing parties, and prestigious universities) were the principal reasons to locate in Paris in spite of the city's high rents. These national associations also had greater freedom than local associations to protest against immigration policies. These associations received their funding from national public and private foundations or from dues-paying members. This funding structure protected them from the threat of subsidy cuts by irate prefects and mayors. Moreover, the prestige of these organizations and their connections to influential people in the state, civil society, and media also provided partial protection from punitive funding cuts (codirector MRAP, personal interview). Local associations on the other hand depended largely on subsidies administered by mayors and prefects, making them vulnerable to cuts stemming from contentious political activities (Garbaye 2005). Paris therefore contained not only the most prominent rights associations in the country but these associations also enjoyed greater freedom to protest government measures. ^ ^ ^ The geography of immigrant social movements in France has been shaped by two different processes. (1) The postwar French state localized immigration policies which pushed immigration politics downward and transformed each locality into a possible site of struggle. (2) Among these possible localities, high concentrations of immigrants and organizational resources provided Paris with a particularly fertile terrain for the emergence of immigrant rights struggles. 4 Putting the pieces together: building immigrant rights networks through urban mobilizations This section examines how housing grievances and subsequent campaigns served to stimulate networking processes between diverse activist clusters in the city. The accumulation of networks in this place over a period of time provided Parisian activists with an extensive reservoir of allies to draw upon for each new round of struggle. The 1970s marked the beginning of several major cycles of immigrant rights mobilizations that stretch out over forty years (Simëant, 1998; Wihtol de Wenden, 1994). The first cycle of mobilizations was initiated by the residents of the SONACOTRA hostels (Hmed, 2007). During the 1980s immigrant mobilizations continued to unfold in Paris (2) Respectively: Fëdëration des Associations de Solidaritë avec les Travailleurs Immigrës (Federation of Associations in Solidarity with Immigrant Workers), Ligue des Droits de l'Homme (Human Rights League), Groupe d'Information et de Soutien des Immigrës (Group of Information and Support of Immigrants), and Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l'Amitië entre les Peuples (Movement against Racism and for the Friendship between People). Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1663 and, again, these mobilizations centered on the issue of housing (Ireland, 1994; Pëchu, 2004; Wihtol de Wenden, 1994). The lack of certification of decent housing required many families to move to France without legal residency visas and settle in dilapidated Parisian hotels or unoccupied apartment buildings. Several fires during the late 1980s provided the mayor with an opportunity to launch a campaign to evict immigrant residents from these establishments. West African families in one squat resisted and called on the mayor of Paris (Jacques Chirac) to relocate them into public apartments and provide them with a certificate of decent housing. These efforts drew the immediate support of the association Housing First (3) (ULA), which had long specialized in housing issues. Soon thereafter, the campaign drew the support of extreme-left squatters. The housing action initiated by the West African family therefore triggered the formation of new connections between three different clusters of activists: the original West African families, traditional housing activists, and a group of radical squatters. These different activists inhabited and interacted with one another in the same building for several months, building up their ties and collective know-how (Pëchu, 2004, page 305). They formed a new association Right to Housing (4) (DAL), to consolidate these ties. While building up ties among this core group of activists, DAL used its contacts with other associations in Paris to broker ties with a number of strategic groups, including the housing association Emmaus, the antiracist association MRAP, and the trade union section of the office for public housing. Through their contacts with MRAP, they also enlisted the support of other rights and antiracist associations including FASTI, LDH, GISTI, and SOS Racisme. In 1990 ten of the West African squatters initiated a hunger strike, with DAL using this action to enlist more political, associational, and media support. DAL was able to pressure the mayor of Paris to concede and offer the immigrant families public housing in the city. In late 1993 DAL launched another campaign to support the occupation of an apartment building on the rue du Dragon by West African families. The accumulated experience of the core group of activists permitted them to quickly turn this particular action into a high-profile event. Commenting on their heightened level of expertise, an organizer noted: ``So we became more and more efficient, we knew how to do things. We were very capable at having dialogues, pressuring for changes in housing policy. We also avoided being beaten up by the police and when that did happen, we were sure that a crew of photographers and media were present. The rare cases in which we were beaten up, we had three television chains and 25 photographers on location, all outside and inside the squat. I want to say that we became extremely competent at what we did '' (Pëchu, 2004, page 89, emphasis added, translated by author). In this instance a core group of activists had, through their years of close collaborations, developed strong working relations with one another, providing them the know-how to become extremely effective in directing and managing these kinds of campaigns. As this campaign unfolded, DAL also tapped into the networks of supporters that had been cultivated in previous rounds of mobilization (rights associations, unions, and parties). It also sought to expand the scale of the struggle by framing it through the concept of `social exclusion' and created a new association (Droits Devants) to direct (3) Un Logement d'Abord. au Logement (Right to Housing). (4) Droit 1664 W Nicholls this broader struggle. This new frame resonated with a number of the rights and antiracist associations and some even suggested subsuming the issue of immigration within it (Pëchu, 2004; Simëant, 1998). Other associations lobbied DAL and Droits Devant to make a clearer connection between `social exclusion' and the conditions facing immigrants in France. ^ ^ ^ The housing campaigns in the late 1980s and early 1990s aimed to pressure city officials to grant immigrant squatters access to suitable accommodations that would satisfy government requirements for family visas. The campaigns accelerated networking processes and permitted local activists to learn how to pull their varied resources to exert pressure on the local state. 5 Nationalizing grievances and network realignments in Paris For years housing had become a proxy battle for the larger struggle to obtain residency rights for immigrants. Because of this, the movement for immigrant rights largely consolidated itself in the urban arena, with the city being both the target (demanding the mayor provide decent immigrant housing) and `relational incubator' of the struggle (Nicholls, 2008). However, in late 1993 the Minister of Interior Charles Pasqua introduced reforms that restricted the number of visas to migrants, limited the criteria to qualify for a `family reunion' visa, introduced random identity checks on foreigners, and implemented measures to accelerate deportations (Berezin, 2009; Hayward and Wright, 2002). The `Pasqua laws' precipitated an important shift in grievances away from the mayor's housing policies and toward the central government's immigration policy. This section describes the rather complicated process that permitted activists to redirect their locally forged activist networks to fight a new battle against the national Pasqua laws. 5.1 Realigning networks and shifting the target to national immigration policy In 1994 the most prominent rights associations in Paris continued to invest their resources in the housing campaign at the rue du Dragon. During this time, small pockets of undocumented migrants created informal organizations (collectifs de sanspapiers) to demand legal residency for their members. The collectifs appeared in 1994 and 1995 throughout the Paris region and ranged in size from 20 to 200 members (Simëant, 1998). Most of these early collectifs were made up of Senegalese and Malian immigrants who employed their strong networks to pool resources and coordinate actions (Blin, 2005; Simëant, 1998). They did not call for the abrogation of the Pasqua laws or for a general amnesty of all undocumented immigrants. Rather, they targeted the department prefect and made a narrow demand for the ten-year residency visa for the members of their collectif (Blin, 2005; Simëant, 1998). Though efforts were made to elicit support from Paris's rights and antiracist associations, most of the associations did not respond to their `calls to action' because they were already heavily invested in the rue du Dragon campaign. The lack of support from these associations left the collectifs isolated and deprived them of the financial, political, and symbolic resources needed to exert pressure on the prefect. Unable to pressure the Paris prefect, in spring 1995 the collectif Foreign Parents of French Children (PEEF) (5) upped the ante by embracing more aggressive tactics (occupying a public building and initiating a hunger strike) and shifting its target to national government officials. Having gained no traction with the Paris prefect, (5) Parents Etrangers d'Enfants Franc°ais. Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1665 the collectif viewed the presidential campaign in 1995 as an opportunity to pressure national officials to order the department prefect to approve the residency applications of their members.(6) ``We had hoped that the Prefect of Paris would have accepted to engage us in a negotiation to find a positive solution for the hundred families of our collectif. Facing the intransigence from the Prefect, 8 among us have decided to start a hunger strike. This is not a form of blackmail. The hunger strike is a cry; the last cry we make to the Prime Minister of the Government'' (T-PEEF 4.18.95). Growing media attention of this action and the end of the rue du Dragon campaign prompted the rights and antiracist associations to connect with the collectif and provide it with legal and political support. The rights and antiracist associations that had been providing support to the immigrant squatters demanding decent public housing from the mayor now found themselves supporting immigrant hunger strikers demanding the regularization of their status from the national government. Thus, by shifting the target to the national government, this collectif initiated the process of moving Paris's immigrant rights networks out of the urban policy arena and into national immigration policy. 5.2 Extending ties: creating a broad network of support in Paris The first round of mobilization in 1995 served as an initial moment to connect two different activist clusters: the collectifs and the rights and antiracist associations. In March 1996 another collectif exploded onto the Parisian social movement scene. Approximately 300 undocumented African immigrants occupied the St. Ambroise church. Soon thereafter, the police dislodged the group from the church and they quickly found refuge in a theater on the outskirts of the city (La Cartoucherie de Vincennes). Following a short stay at the theater, a warehouse was made available to them by a union section of Paris's railway workers. The sans-papiers abandoned the warehouse on 28 June and went on to occupy the nearby church of St. Bernard, with eight among them launching a hunger strike. These actions unfolded mostly in three districts (arrondissements) in northern Paris. At each stop in this six-month sojourn, new ties were created through the `snowballing' work of activist brokers. The campaign became a strategic event that accelerated networking processes in the city, with new bonds and bridges enabling Parisian activists to pull their collective resources in effective ways. The size and intensity of the initial action at St. Ambroise (300 undocumented immigrants occupying a Parisian church) drew immediate attention from across the Paris activist milieu. Several of the sans-papiers participating in the occupation had also been active in the previous campaign in 1995 and had developed good relations with several French associations, especially Droits Devant. This association became an important broker because of its connections with three activist clusters in the city. The association had its origins in the housing and squatters' mobilization at the rue du Dragon but it also had direct links with rights and antiracist associations (FASTI and MRAP in particular) and key sans-papiers activists. Droits Devant employed these multiplex connections to broker relations between the sans-papiers at St. Ambroise and the various anti-racist and rights associations in Paris. Jean-Paul Amara, the leader of Droits Devant, made in-person requests from his allies in the rights associations to support the sans-papiers rally in front of the St. Ambroise church. Following the rally, Amara visited the associations to personally thank them for their support (6) Sikkink (2005) has called this kind of scale shift a `boomerang strategy', whereby activists pressure higher level officials to open up opportunities in lower level institutions. 1666 W Nicholls (M-FASTI 3.30.96). The labor-intensive work of personally brokering relations allowed the collectif to gain the support of four prominent associations: LDH, GISTI, FASTI, and MRAP. These associations would provide the collectif with legal, political, financial, and discursive resources. Several weeks after the occupation of St. Ambroise, the police forcefully removed the sans-papiers from the church. The rights associations employed their networks and found a theater (La Cartoucherie de Vincennes) on the outskirts of the city to house the collectif. The theater director was a veteran supporter of various causes in the city, dating back to Michel Foucault's prison reform campaigns and the SONACOTRA struggles in the 1970s. The move to the theater unleashed another important round of networking. The rights and antiracist associations each became brokers in their own right and began circulating information about the struggle through their own networks. Through constant outreach, these associations extended the mobilization networks to include two new activist clusters. First, a cluster of North African and Turkish associations (ATMF, ATF, FTCR, ACCORT (7) ) entered the network through these channels. These mainline immigrant associations were important because they possessed a great deal of experience in their own right and they gave this mobilization increased legitimacy by including ethnic minorities into the leadership rank (instead of the dominance of white middle-class leftists). Second, the rights associations recruited a group of prestigious personalities (intellectuals, media personalities, humanitarians) who were constituted into the Colle©ge de Mëdiateurs (ie College of Mediators). The principal function of the Colle©ge was to use the cultural and symbolic capital of its members to represent the sans-papiers to the government and the national media. They drew from the discursive tradition of misërabilisme to create a compelling moral narrative of the immigrants (Passeron and Grignon, 1989). They were cast as hard-working, family-loving people who had been made `illegal' and `clandestine' by the Pasqua laws. This narrative would become extremely important for framing the argument of the sans-papiers in France. It soon became clear that the small theater lacked the capacity to house the hundreds of sans-papiers and supporters. The associations contacted allies with the CFDT (8) rail workers union in Paris for assistance. The union provided a warehouse and basic communication infrastructure. The CFDT's involvement in this high-profile campaign encouraged greater interest from other Paris-based unions (CGT, SUD, and the FSU (9) ). This support was important because unions were rich organizations and provided funding and equipment to the sans-papiers. These resources were used to provide the sans-papiers with the basic materials (office space, paper, copy machine, telephone, etc) needed to create an organization of their own. Members of the CGT worked with several leaders of the sans-papiers to create the National Coordination of Sans Papiers (CNSP) (president of CNSP, personal interview with author). (7) Respectively: Association des Travailleurs Maghrëbins de France (Association of Maghrëbin Workers of France), Associations des Tunisiens en France (Association of Tunisians in France), Fëdëration des Tunisiens pour une Citoyennetë des Deux Rives (Federation of Tunisians for a Citizenship of Two Banks), L'Assemblëe Citoyenne des Originaires de Turquie (Citizenship Assembly of Turkish Origins). (8) Confëdëration Franc°aise Dëmocratique du Travail (French Confederation of Democracy of Work). (9) Respectively: Confëdëration Gënërale du Travail (General Confederation of Work); Solidaires Unitaires Dëmocratique (Solidarity, Unitary, Democracy); Fëdëration Syndicale Unitaire (United Union Federation). Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1667 Facing police repression, on 28 June 1996 the sans-papiers responded by occupying the church of St. Bernard in the 18th arrondissement and eight of them initiated a hunger strike. This place became a major focal point of the campaign. As word of the campaign spread, undocumented migrants throughout Paris descended on the site in an effort to have their own individual cases reviewed by the authorities. In addition to this, St. Bernard became an important focal point by drawing the support of prominent Parisian entertainers and intellectuals. Entertainers like Emmanuel Bëart became supporters of the sans-papiers and fixtures at the protest site. Intellectuals also became actively involved at St. Bernard, with Pierre Bourdieu and Emmanuel Terray playing particularly prominent roles in the struggle. The symbolic capital of these personalities drew in more media and enhanced the moral weight and legitimacy of the immigrant claims. The campaign in 1995 established initial connections between the collectifs and rights associations, but the six-month campaign in 1996 permitted a radical extension of these networks. In particular, direct connections were established with several activist clusters in the city, including trade unions, traditional North African immigrant associations, prestigious intellectuals, and media personalities. These connections were facilitated by face-to-face brokering by well-connected activists. Each new connection resulted in different contributions to the sans-papiers struggle, including money, legal expertise, facilities, strategic expertise, and cultural and symbolic capital. In this way, the snowballing process of network formation in the city contributed to the accumulation of substantial resources to contest the Pasqua laws. 5.3 Consolidating strong ties: the collective power of the rights associations In addition to creating new connections with diverse actors, St. Bernard was also an important site for consolidating existing relations between the leading rights and antiracist associations. While these associations had worked with one another on various campaigns in the past, this particular campaign was the first time they worked so closely with one another for an extended period of time. Enhanced trust and knowhow enabled them to not only contribute more heavy resources to the campaign, but also to develop strategies to deploy the diverse resources flowing into the campaign in effective ways. The positioning of these associations in this campaign required constant face-toface interactions over a six-month period. Most of the rights and antiracist associations became brokers in their own right. Each served as interlocutors between the sanspapiers and a range of different stakeholders, including the government, police, media, the Catholic church, other associations, unions, prominent personalities, left-wing parties, and the general public. Through these interactions, the associations gained access to different strands of information about this complex and unstable political field. For the associations to pool these different strands of information and make them into actionable intelligence, they held frequent face-to-face meetings (three ^ four times a week) throughout the first four months of the campaign (March to June 1996). Each meeting helped them pool and interpret strands of information collectively and plan their next tactical moves. By the time the sans-papiers arrived at St. Bernard in late June, the face-to-face meetings intensified to one or two a day (codirector of MRAP, personal interview with author) and were held at the office of ATMF, which sat 50 m from the occupied church (codirectors of GISTI, personal interview with author). This intensive round of collaborations enhanced this cluster's abilities to process and interpret complex information, enhancing their `know-how' to conduct the campaign. St. Bernard therefore solidified working and affective relations between the 1668 W Nicholls leaders of these associations and reinforced their commitment to the struggles of the sans-papiers. The strong bonds between rights associations, their contributions of important resources (ie financial, social, political, legal, and cultural resources), and their enhanced knowledge capacities placed them in a position of leadership within the network. ^ ^ ^ Whereas urban housing issues had dominated the movement in the previous years, restrictive immigration legislation came to dominate the movement in the mid-1990s. The process of deploying networks constructed through urban struggles to a nationallevel mobilization was by no means automatic. It required the realignment between the cluster of rights associations and sans-papiers, the extension of new relations with other activist clusters throughout the city, and, finally, the consolidation of strong ties between rights and antiracist associations. The extension of ties to various activist clusters permitted the flow of a wide range of resources into the campaign while the consolidation of ties among the rights associations provided them with the trust and know-how to deploy their diverse resources and information in effective ways. 6 Building a national movement network: connecting center to the periphery The process of shifting to the national scale did not only entail a realignment of networks in Paris but it also required the outward extension of networks to other localities throughout the country. Many of the larger rights and antiracist organizations in Paris were the headquarters of national associations. These associations had branch sections and affiliate associations throughout the country. Jean-Paul Amara, the leader of Droits Devant, sought to gain the support of these associations not only because of their specialized resources but also because of their national reach. Reporting on Amara's personal visit to FASTI, one observer reported, ``After having evoked the dangers and difficulties of the struggle, the nervous and physical exhaustion of the `refugees', and the repressive attitude of the government, Amara called on FASTI to relay the struggle to its sections across the country'' (M-FASTI 3.30.96). The infrastructure of the national associations was not used to micromanage local sections but to encourage their engagement in local mobilizations and disseminate information and discourses across the country. ``It seems to us very natural to rapidly circulate information and material we acquire to the sections. This material strengthens their [the section offices] abilities to support the sans-papiers in their respective cities'' (M-FASTI 4.27.96). This information included legal information analyzed by expert lawyers from LDH and GISTI in Paris as well as analyses concerning the dynamics of mobilization and the shifting positions of the government. The specialized information was used by activists in local sections to develop their own mobilizations in support of the sanspapiers. In addition to specialized information, the national offices of the associations also provided their sections with the discourses to frame their local struggles and claims. ``You can, if you wish, employ the texts emanating from the intellectuals and writers that affirm, `The procedures of expulsion are unjust and render hardworking families into clandestine criminals ... .' You can even take up the pen to write something along these lines'' (M-FASTI 4.27.96). The national office of ATMF provided its local sections with `talking points' to frame debates and discussions in local meetings. Cities and the unevenness of social movement space 1669 ``The sections need to initiate local coalitions when they don't already exist and use prepared debate points to lead discussions in these meetings'' (M-ATMF 5.4.96). In a later statement, the National Bureau of the ATMF made an explicit call on its sections to employ the discourses developed in the Paris coalition. ``The National Bureau suggests that the sections adopt the statements and criteria of the Colle©ge de Mëdiateurs in their struggles for regularization. The National Bureau incites the sections to inform, support and organize the struggles of the sans-papiers and use the statements and criteria cited above to do so'' (M-ATMF 6.16.96). A spatial division of labor emerged between the central hub (Paris) and the multiple peripheries of the national network. Paris was responsible for carrying out many of the intellectually intensive activities in the national social movement network. They produced legal analyses and arguments, analyzed the rapidly changing political field, and constructed the central discourses and claims that framed the movement. This was the result of the concentration of key intellectual resources in Paris and the abilities of these activistsöthrough constant face-to-face meetings öto combine their different resources (tangible and intangible) into powerful instruments of struggle. The `output' of their intellectually intensive work was diffused throughout national associational networks. As local associations became active in forming supportive coalitions in different cities, they came to talk and represent their struggles in similar ways to the national offices. Thus, local mobilizations emerged in a well-defined discursive and informational space that had largely been constructed by Parisian activists and intellectuals. Arguments, claims, and desires had been scripted prior to their actual emergence in the different localities across the country. This emergent discursive unity contrasted with cracks in national networks. As noted earlier, local sections of national associations faced more severe political and financial constraints than the national offices. In contrast to the national offices, local sections received much of their funding from local authorities (ie prefect and mayor). These funding sources did not only provide for very limited resources to these associations but they also made them vulnerable to funding cuts in response to protest activities. Moreover, the small budgets of local associations were already earmarked for other existing programs (eg community activities, and educational services). Allocating money from existing programs to support new, resource-intensive campaigns represented a strain on the budgets of many local associations. The richer and freer Parisian organizations prodded the provinces to participate in the campaign, and the poorer and politically constrained provincial sections struggled to keep up any way they could. This dynamic helped expose the structural disconnect between the Paris and the provinces. FASTI sections raised serious complaints about the inability of the national office to provide them with additional material support to assist with these campaigns. These tensions resulted in calls for the redistribution of financial resources and decision-making powers to the local sections (ie decentralization). Several leaders of local sections argued that the national office consumed a disproportionate amount of resources for what it actually did. In response, the president of FASTI argued, ``The national and local roles complement one another, each one having a different kind of intervention from the other. The national FASTI office is a little like the mother of all the sections; without the mother, the children are lost'' (M-FASTI 9.9.96). Facing similar criticisms from local sections, the national office of ATMF responded with a move to recentralize decision-making processes in the national organization (M-ATMF 9.21.96). 1670 W Nicholls In sum, national associations like FASTI, ATMF, LDH, and others played a central role in extending this movement beyond Paris. Local sections of national associations were not only asked to support sans-papiers mobilizations in their localities but also to play a leading role within them. While the central offices assumed responsibility over the intellectually intensive activities (processing legal and political analyses, constructing mobilization frames and discourses, etc), the local sections employed specialized information and discourses to mount and direct local actions. This division of labor and the constraints facing local associations resulted in distributional conflicts between center and periphery, with local associations calling for a downward redistribution of resources and the national leadership pushing back by reasserting its real and symbolic power over these localities. Thus, while the extensions of networks beyond Paris made this into a truly national campaign, it also exacerbated geographical cleavages which threatened to fracture the network along geographical lines. 7 Conclusion: Paris as hub of a national social movement space This paper has identified how several spatial processes have intersected to shape the geographical form and dynamics of France's immigrant rights movement. The process of rescaling key areas of immigration policy to the local arena resulted in transforming the `local' into a key terrain of political engagement for immigrant rights activists in France. Though all localities in France were turned into potential sites of struggle, Paris contained the largest concentrations of immigrants and organizations capable of undertaking these battles. What is rather interesting about this case is the importance of small-scale battles initiated by immigrants which snowballed into complex network structures. This pattern repeated itself through several rounds of struggle from the 1970s to the 1990s, with each round strengthening ties within preexisting activist clusters while creating a web of new connections throughout the city. Over time, Paris had developed a rich, complex, and diverse activist networks, with activists from a diverse range of backgrounds directly or indirectly in contact with one another. While this type of relational infrastructure was cultivated through many urban-based mobilizations, they could be shifted to struggles in the national political arena. This is precisely what occurred in 1996. The four processes identified in this paper (localization of immigration policy, urban concentration of immigrants and organizations, activist network building within cities, activist network building across cities) combined in a unique way in France to produce a distinctive social movement space with its own structures, rules, and internal power dynamics. National and local factors (the particular structure of the French state, the militancy of West African immigrants in Paris, the radical tradition of human rights associations, etc) contributed to combining these processes into a rather unique social movement space. In spite of the peculiarities of the French case, these generic processes can be viewed as playing out and affecting immigrant rights movements in other countries as well. In the United States, for example, many immigration policies have been ceded to the local arena, there have been strong concentrations of immigrants and organizations in certain urban centers (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, etc), and struggles within some of these cities (Los Angeles in particular) have resulted in the formation of potent activist networks within them (Milkman, 2006; Nicholls, 2003; Soja, 2010). The concentration of these kinds of networks in Los Angeles has allowed activists within the city to play a particularly influential role in various immigrant campaigns, from the Immigrant Workers' Freedom Ride in 2003 (Leitner et al, 2008) to the most recent boycotts against Arizona. 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