Mayors Spurn Sarkozy Immigration Crackdown

French leftists aren't about to help Nicolas Sarkozy make good on the immigration crackdowns he promised during his campaign for president. Eight Paris-area mayors have refused to cooperate with measures that include deportation quotas and mandatory DNA-testing for prospective immigrants. Human rights groups denounced Sarkozy for treating immigrants as "disposable objects," Der Spiegel reports.

Sarkozy's campaign promise to expel 25,000 illegal immigrants this year yielded 11,000 through July. "We are not at your orders. Your obsessive vision of numbers is more condemnable because human beings are involved," the mayors wrote in an open letter to immigration officials. The director of an immigration rights group chimed in: "The problem is when expulsion policy becomes the alpha and omega of migration policy." (More Nicolas Sarkozy stories.)