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Open letter to Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic
Mr. President, we are marching. From the four corners of the country, for equality, we are marching. Several hundred of us, led by the Sans-Papiers, will cross this country where we live, coming from the south, the north, the east and the west, supported by the solidarity of people on the roundabouts, the roads, our village squares, our city neighbourhoods. And there will be tens of thousands of us in Paris on Saturday, October 17 to go to the Elysée Palace. From all the cities in the country and the neighbourhoods where we live together, from the schools where we send our children, from the places where we work, we will march. We will march to pay tribute to our elders, men and women who came from Algeria killed in their hundreds by the police on October 17, 1961 while they were marching for freedom. We will march in tribute to thousands of our brothers and sisters who die every year on the migration routes as they walk hoping for a better and more just life. Led by the Sans-Papiers, we will march with hundreds of collectives of solidarity and struggle, our associations and unions, our families, our friends, our neighbours, our colleagues for the regularization of all the undocumented. Mr. President, we are not marching to ask for a gift or beg your generosity. We have known for a long time, even before the billions you are distributing now, that the question of means was not the problem. We are marching to win equality. We live here, together, with or without papers. And you know that the absence of rights for undocumented immigrants and the precariousness for asylum seekers plague the whole of society, promote racism, legitimize racial profiling and all social inequalities and attacks on people. We are marching for the future. In these times of pandemic where you call on everyone's responsibility, we take ours by marching respecting health rules. Your responsibility is to close the detention centres, provide access to decent housing for all homeless and poorly housed people and guarantee rights to ensure protection of all, at work and in daily life, and equal access to health. We are marching for a safer society for all. Please let us remind you that, during the pandemic, many undocumented immigrants, women and men, are essential workers, forced to work extremely long hours, over-exploited, without rights and / or losing their jobs without financial protection. And we are marching with and for young people, this future means that you leave them on the street to be prey to trafficking or for whom "minority recognition" too often means loneliness in unhealthy hotel rooms, without access to school, waiting for their majority to be put back on the streets and increase the ranks of Sans-Papiers. So, Mr. President, we will be at your door on October 17th. We hope it will be open. Mr. President, we want equality. Nothing more than equality. And you? Looking forward for your response, please accept, Mr. President, the expression of our determination to fight for a safer, a more just and a more equal society. The participants of the Sans-Papiers’ Act 3 18 September 2020
Original letter: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/marche-des-solidarites/blog/180920/marche-des-sans-papiers-lettre-emmanuel-macron
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