France forges ahead with immigrant expulsions

PARIS, Aug 15 (Reuters) Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy today defended his decision to expel thousands of illegal immigrants this year, saying France needed an uncompromising immigration policy following recent rioting in its suburbs.

Sarkozy, the clear favourite to represent the right in next year's presidential elections, has faced fierce protests over moves to send whole families packing and has invested a lot of political capital in the crackdown on immigration.

Speaking on television, Sarkozy said officials had received almost 30,000 applications from families seeking residency papers when a deadline for requests expired at the weekend.

This was some 10,000 more than had been expected, but despite the higher numbers, Sarkozy stuck to an earlier prediction that just 6,000 applications would be accepted.

Some expulsion orders had already been served, Sarkozy said, and many more were in the pipeline.

The ambitious minister, himself the son of a Hungarian immigrant, tightened residency rules after youths in poor suburbs -- many of them home to immigrant families -- went on the rampage last year in a wave of rioting that shocked France.

''You saw what happened in the suburbs, one sees the difficulty of France's integration system. What's the reason for this? The reason is that our immigration policy has not been mastered,'' he said.

''Just coming to France does not give you the right to stay in France,'' he added.

Some 4.5 million immigrants live in France, official data shows, and the interior ministry estimates there are between 200,000 and 400,000 illegal foreigners in the country.

France is not alone in struggling to draw up a clear immigration policy. Many countries in the European Union have been inundated with migrants mainly from poor nations looking to build a better life for themselves in the West.

Italy recently granted residency to some 500,000 illegal immigrants, while Spain legalised almost 570,000.

Sarkozy has ruled out such measures, saying previous amnesties have only triggered fresh waves of immigrants.

But while opinion polls regularly show a majority of French people favour expelling illegal immigrants, there has been unease about the campaign to use children enrolled at schools as a way of rooting out whole families of illegal immigrants.

Some critics have even compared the policy to the round up of Jews during World War Two -- something Sarkozy rejected. ''I hear a certain number of people say that this is a deportation. It is very shocking for all those whose families were deported (during World War Two),'' he said.

''I don't see why sending a Ukrainian back to Ukraine or a Malian without papers back to Mali goes against the principles of the (French) Republic.'' REUTERS PDS PM0213