FRENCH POLICE RAID ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT HANG-OUTS

Hundreds Arrested in Paris Sweep, Deported Overnight

Detainees Mostly North Africans, Asians and Deadbeat Americans posing as Writers

French police arrest an undocumented American 'writer' in Paris. In his pocket authorities found a poorly-written poem entitled "The Stain of the Yak."

Paris – 5/17/08 On Tuesday morning 23 year old American college drop-out Lyle Ginsberg was sitting outside Paris’ renowned Café Flor, in the Latin Quarter, drinking an espresso and pretending to write with a number 2 pencil on a yellow block of notebook paper. By Tuesday night the dishevelled, beret-wearing youth was back at his parents’ house outside of Lancaster, PA.

“I don’t know how it all happened,” said the allegedly aspiring writer, reached by telephone just hours after his deportation and whose parents could be heard in the background reprimanding him to get a job. “I was writing something grand, something true, and it was raining and the rain was pounding the leaves and that was the most real thing about that day in Paris, that grey city of men all with their swell arguments and the women who always came along to wreck it all. And I was drinking to start the day and thinking about going to watch the horses with Pierre who also loved a drink if you were inviting when the police came and dragged me away.”

Ginsberg, who says he has an original prose voice and lots of ideas for novels, is one of over a hundred American ‘writers’ who the French police say they’d been monitoring for months as part of a larger operation against illegal immigrants and posers.

Yesterday French Interior Minister Michele Alliot Marie told reporters such raids would continue until “the obnoxious blight is eradicated."

"The French people do not feel safe,” she said in comments to French radio EuropeOne. “Paris has become a city where just for walking home alone at night you can be mugged, harassed or exposed to exaggerated purple prose from impromptu ‘literary’ events.”

Listen to live reading of "The Stain of the Yak"



The Americans were deported under a new immigration law that prohibits foreigners from, among other things, dressing like Gertrude Stein or loitering near the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. The law also bans the suspicious practice of ‘accidentally’ leaving behind signed poems in bars and cafes or pretending not to be American when lost tourists ask for directions. Some crimes - for example ostentatious or extended displays of ennui - could also come with a 3 month prison sentence prior to deportation.

When asked about the hundreds of Algerians and Chinese also deported in the immigration crackdown, Interior Minister Alliot Marie said, “Oh yes, they were caught up in the sweep as well.”