Force Feeding Them Cake

PARIS: A series of highly-publicized hunger strikes and street demonstrations by Africans immigrants seeking work is straining French officials torn by their humanitarian impulses and a skyrocketing unemployment rate. On Monday morning, 300 French National guardsmen stormed St. Bernard's church in Paris and carried away ten Malian hunger strikers to hospitals for forced feeding. The immigrants from the former French colony have been publicly starving themselves since July 4th to publicize their request for working papers. Workers from the former French Africa were once welcome in France, but with an unemployment rate of 12.5 percent, Africans are viewed as competition for increasingly scarce jobs. Illegals are blamed for rising crime rates, and the government is facing pressure to enforce tough immigration policies on the illegal population, which recent estimates put as high as half a million. Since May 1st of last year, the government has shipped about 15, 50O immigrants home on chartered aircraft. However, many of the expelled Africans easily slip back into the country. By Monday evening, all 10 of the Mali protesters removed earlier by police were back at their campout at St. Bernard's and 12 more had volunteered to join their hunger strike. "We said it before: if one of the strikers was prevented from continuing we would replace him," one said. "People say that France is a democratic country but it has become a veritable dictatorship...all we want is to work, we are not lazy." -->