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A follow-up question: What do you do when those clowns go on strike all the time and none of your public services are running at all?

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Several solutions: car pooling, bikes, taxis, work from home, and the best solutions of all: not going to work that day!

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Also, with all the controversy and criticism here in the US about illegal immigration (mostly from Mexico), do you care to comment on France's own immigration clusterfk? It seems the French attitude and treatment of North African immigrants is worse than the Mexican experience in the US. Can we tack this one up to pride as well? Is this basically the French being French, like "Manny being Manny"?

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I'm not very familiar with the U.S. immigration policy, but I think it's pretty similar to ours. Immigrants are not welcome here, unless they are something the country needs or are political refugees. Illegal immigrants are being deported back to their country. There have been quite a few scandals about that: young kids, or elderly people who've been in France for decades, who were being deported. Our new president and immigration minister have a very strict, zero-tolerance policy in mind and they clearly want to enforce it.

For example we have a law that we call the "rapprochement familial" ("bring families together"), which allows legal immigrants to have family members enter France and stay. Since some families were using this to allow non-relatives to enter the country, the conservative government wants to instigate DNA tests to ensure that these people are indeed related. It caused an uproar amongst liberals.

EDIT: I'm going to bed (3:30am here), please keep posting your questions and I'll answer them tommorrow. G'night all.