BY ELISA MIGNOT, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

"We were living in a truck when the Americans attacked," said the man in a low and shaky voice. "We hid behind the driver's seat."

He was perched on a chair in the refugee service of Amnesty International in Paris, recounting his odyssey with his wife and three children from Iraq to France.

His name is Yeshar, he is an Iraqi Kurd from Baghdad and he said he faces sure death if he has to go home.

"We went all the way to Istanbul," he continued. "We stayed there for five months. Then, we took a boat, next a train and a boat again. We arrived at a big harbor. There were some Arabs, they told me to take another train to go to Paris. It was at this moment, I realized I was in France."

Waves, roads and rails brought him to another confusing landscape, this one made up of offices, wretched papers and endless interviews. Now he winds his way through the halls of French justice, pleading his case for political asylum to judges and bureaucrats who sift through thousands of stories like his every year.

The asylum system in France, as in other western countries, is not like other courts.

BY ALEXANDER KNETIG, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Carera always rents a donkey from his friends

A lonely man is crossing the Savannah in his wooden horse cart, hand-painted in red, yellow and green, the national colous of Senegal. In this wide emptiness burned by the torrid Sahel sun, his unhurried whistling is the only sound one can hear within a radius of several kilometers.

Albert Carera left his hometown of Louga three hours earlier to amble slowly to his farm, located near the River Senegal more than 300 kilometers north of Dakar, close to the border with Mauritania.

Despite his primitive means of transport, the 54-year-old Carera is not a poor man. He is a landowner, thanks to money his relatives have regularly sent him from the United States and Europe. But he represents a new chapter in the old story of immigrant remittances, one built as much on tradition as modernity.

Since 1995, when western money transfer systems started operating in Africa, remittances have reshaped the continent and enriched companies like Western Union, whose first agencies in Louga opened in 1999. Western Union's main global competitor, Moneygram, followed in 2003.

Today, the whole town is full of advertisements offering money transfer services, reflecting the fact that this city of barely 100,000 people has become Senegal's emigration capital. More than half of its population is living outside the country, making Louga extraordinarily profitable for global money transfer agencies.

BY ALEXANDRA STEIGRAD, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[this story was originally published by Reuters on April 29, 2007, and ran in dozens of news outlets around the world, including Washingtonpost.com, Boston.com and NYTimes.com]

to the companion story "'I have to do this.' Moroccan to have hymen resewn"

Sitting in a cafe near the Champs Elysees, the 26-year-old French-born woman of Algerian descent looks like any other Parisian. But two months ago, she did something none of her friends have done.

She had her hymen re-sewn, technically making her a virgin again.

"I'm glad I had it done," said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I wanted to reconstruct part of my life, to reconstruct myself so that I could feel better about myself."

This 30-minute outpatient procedure, called "hymenoplasty" and costing between 1,500 and 3,000 euros ($2,000-$4,000), is increasingly popular among young women of North African descent in France.

BY ALVARO VILLALOBOS LOPEZ, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Sitting at a table, he drinks his coffee while talking to two women. His white shirt is spotless. His hair, in place. His words roll slowly. He looks determined. António de Macedo Andrade, Portuguese immigrant, is the owner of the restaurant Paris Madeira, in Paris' 9th district.

Like Andrade, Alberto Alves, Antonia Gonçalves, and José da Silva arrived in Paris between 1968 and 1970. They had to work hard to create their own companies in and around Paris. Affluent and prosperous, they represent a vital minority in France's Portuguese community.

In 1962, 50.000 Portuguese immigrants lived in France. Six years later, there were 300,000. By 1975, 800,000 Portuguese had settled. Since then, the figure stabilized and the community composed of Portuguese and Franco-Portuguese, is now approaching a million individuals. Within Paris, the Portuguese population of 47,000 is the largest foreign community, before the Algerians, Moroccans or Tunisians, according to the latest official census in 1999.

BY MADELEINE LEROYER, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[A version of this story won third prize in the 2007 Daniel Pearl Award, a competition sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, in collaboration with the Ecole de Journalisme de Sciences Po in Paris, and was published in the Wall Street Journal Online]

Read the English version
Read the French version
Read the interview of Jean-Francois Dubost in English or in French). Lawyer, specialized in international law, Jean-Francois Dubost is the head of the "Refugee Department" at Amnesty International France.

A balloon explodes. Raissa jumps, her hands pressed hard on her pregnant belly. Another balloon explodes. Her eyes feverishly look for her sons. It's Dec. 26, 2006, in Brest, France. The association, Brest Education Without Borders, that coordinates the different collectives that provide relief to the undocumented migrants living in the city, has organized a Christmas party in the association's house. Children play. Raissa tries to forget the memories, the explosions, the bombs.

BY FANNIE OLIVIER, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[A version of this story won second prize in the 2007 Daniel Pearl Award, a competition sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, in collaboration with the Ecole de Journalisme de Sciences Po in Paris, and was published in the Wall Street Journal Online]

Read the English version
Read the French version



Virginie and Ronnie's apartment is perched at the top of a long and narrow spiral staircase. Located in a popular Paris neighborhood near the Gare du Nord train station, it is mansard-roofed and tiny. A painting is soiled and the walls are moldy. A visitor is struck by the three posters the tenants have pinned to the walls. Like a bowl of fresh air in this contained space, they depict the open space of Quebec. Written in French, a slogan in the center of the posters reads: "Make your life in Quebec." For the young French couple, it is their new mantra to escape the banality of their Parisian life.

Virginie is a 24-year-old business school graduate who could only find a job in Paris as a waitress. Ronnie has an undergraduate degree in English but dreams of becoming an illustrator. They want to abandon a country they think has no future. Or rather that has no future for them, professionally.

Next September, they will take off for Montreal, the economic capital of Quebec, to try their luck, as so many of their French compatriots did before them, in French-speaking America. Their ticket is one-way. They hope to resettle in the Canadian province of their dreams though neither has ever been to Quebec before.

Each year, 3000 to 4000 French decide to emigrate permanently to Quebec, according to the figures of the Quebec Immigration Ministry. Moreover, 7000 others arrive with temporary work visas, and 5000 more as exchange students. But the dream of Quebec sometimes turns into a nightmare since hundreds of them come back to France every year.

BY AURELIE TOULEMONDE, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Two versions of this articles are availlable
English
French

"B612!"

Twelve high pitched voices holler in unison as fingers shoot to the ceiling. Sitting in the back row, Yassine, a 12-year-old boy, in hallmark baggy pants and hooded jumper has leapt to his feet. His body now stretches across his desk, his arm reaching towards Madame Peltier, the teacher standing at the front of the classroom. His extra effort does the trick. He is rewarded by a disapproving glare but gets the right to answer.

"The Little Prince came from planet B612," he stammers in French. The words sound like rocks in his mouth but he smiles, clearly pleased with himself. And he should be. Only four months ago, Yassine barely spoke any French. Today, he is reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery's famous novel.

Madame Peltier's students may already look like typical French school students, but none of them are. They all come from overseas and have been in France for no more than a matter of months, some of them only weeks.

During the past school year, 40,000 non-French speakers, like Yassine, have joined the ranks of France's schools. Newly arrived migrant children may represent only 0.4% of the student body, a number which has remained steady for the past half-decade, but the challenge for the French education system is significant. The issue of whether the move goes well is obviously critical to the wellbeing of these children but also to that of the country. School is nothing less than the frontline of integration and the riots which rocked the country in November 2005 were proof of how essential it is that immigrant populations find their place.

Whether searching for jobs, looking to reunite families or fleeing war-torn countries, people are crossing borders, and they're taking their children with them. Morocco, Algeria, Cuba, Portugal, Romania, Poland, South Korea, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the United States and Bolivia: 11 nationalities out of 12 students. Mme. Peltier's 'classe d'accueil' in this middle school in Paris' 15th arrondissement mirrors what most developed countries are experiencing today.

BY JACK C. DOPPELT, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

When Ramadan Khattab left Ramallah for Paris in 1999, it was his first trip to Europe. The Palestinian's English was better than his French, though he'd spent only four years in school and learned no English there. He'd crossed borders before, usually to Jordan or to Israel. His stay in Israel had been his longest away from home; a stretch of 14 months in two Israeli prisons when he was 18 years old, for throwing stones at Israeli troops during the First Intifada.

This time he was leaving Palestine for Europe, thanks to a music scholarship he received to study at a conservatory in Angers, 200 miles southwest of Paris. Seven years later, he can be found often playing bass with the Classique Metropolitain, a diverse group of musicians, inside the Metro station at Chatelet in the heart of Paris.

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