Immigration and Paris

 Let's start out our series on immigration with the capital of a country that's famous for not really accepting outsiders: Paris, France. For all that I call on the hoary adage that, as Ronald Reagan put it, "you can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman," you can, of course, become a citizen of the French Republic, and before that a permanent resident. But should you want to? Does Paris present itself well as a city for immigrants--and particularly, does it have the urbanist elements that you'd want in a city you might move to?

OK, this one might be pretty straightforward: as consistently one of the ten-most-visited cities by international travelers in the world, Paris certainly has what it takes to draw people there. But what about the infrastructure to actually live there?

Mais oui, as they say.

1. The non-missing middle

Let me start with something important that I will likely say again and again in this series: to my knowledge, no major Western city does not have a housing crisis of some degree. Paris is no exception, and Parisians who read this (if any of them ever do) will no doubt groan when I say that comparatively, the housing stock there is well-designed and relatively plentiful at the level that Americans would call the missing middle. Housing there is not dominated by the skyscrapers of a Vancouver or a New York, but neither is it the sprawling bungalows of a Houston. Rather, there are extensive sections of the city with midrise, dense housing--some even new built, not just historic avenues--that allow for lots of people to live in places with good streetscapes at scale.

This can be historic quarters.

It can also look a great deal more second-half-of-the-20th-century.

The key is that it means more people per square kilometer without giant high-rises, and it means there are places to live in the city. Does it mean it's cheap to live there? Mais non. But it does mean that the city has space, even if that's often filled with people who are also paying high rents.

2. Getting around getting easier

Paris may not be cheap, but it is very, very easy to get around. The Grand Paris Express is making it even easier. And the surrounding region is linked in effectively with the RER (which might help with some of those housing costs since it drops travel time to the city from places with outside-of-the-city rents).

I will never tire of these pictures of the RER in Noisy-le-Sec, but the key to me is that they show how the Parisian transit system goes well beyond what we think of as normal in US transit systems. This empowers immigrant communities. Roughly 30% of Noisy-le-Sec is made up of immigrants, ten percent over that of Paris proper. You can move to parts of the Île-de-France region (the larger region in which Paris is located) and still easily get around without a car and without even having to talk to anyone in French or any other language. Is it far out? No. But there are millions of people in that zone, and that means both the opportunity to find community and the chance to seek out employment, living arrangements, and other practical matters in a less constrained area. 

And that was just one RER line: this very different rolling stock will take you to very different places where you can also find opportunity.

3. Food and drink

Look, I'm not here to talk about gourmet French food. Nous mangeons le cuisine moins cher ici. I'm talking about this:

These are baguette sandwiches, and they are the best--and the cheapest.

Food is substantially cheaper in Paris than in, say, New York City. Heck, food prices are even vaguely similar to Davenport (obviously the housing and other prices may be higher, since Davenport is a cheap place to live in general). Paris has food for you as an immigrant, and you'll be able to afford it and feel like you're integrating at the same time.

This might seem not to be an urbanist consideration, but I'm talking here about the food culture, not a specific restaurant: the idea that this is a city where there is cheap food on many corners (I got that sandwich from a random shop down the block from where I was staying, not a place I Googled to find) and where the urban form is such that you're expected to be able to walk into a corner patisserie or boulangerie and find good, inexpensive bread, pastries, and related foods. That's culture rather than built environment, but it's still urbanism. It's about the kind of city Paris is.

All of this is without mentioning the touristy bits.

Obligatory Eiffel Tower shot.

And while I do think it makes a city a good place to live to have amenities that people want to visit--how often are you actually going to be in the Louvre if you live in Paris?

How often are you going to eat? To take the train to work? 

That's right. What makes Paris a place that can support the immigrant experience isn't the tourism. It's the fact that around all that tourism there's a busy, beating city that you can find a place in.

Now--getting a visa? That's not necessarily simple. But as an urbanist place to live, it's got some major advantages.