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Allons enfants!

French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron on Saturday called on U.S. scientists, academics and entrepreneurs at odds with Donald Trump’s administration to move to France.

Margaret Soltan, February 6, 2017 12:57PM
Posted in: foreign universities

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12 Responses to “Allons enfants!”

  1. dmf Says:

    it’s a clever line but in a world where the only choices are between technocrats and oligarchs the rest of us are in for a rough ride…
    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/eric-schneiderman-donald-trump-new-york-214734

  2. David Foster Says:

    I expect some of these “scientists, academics and entrepreneurs at odds with Donald Trump’s administration” would be upset to find that France has a burqa ban.

  3. Alan Allport Says:

    Why do you assume that they wouldn’t be perfectly aware of that fact?
    Personally I think the ban is a poorly conceived way to deal with a genuine problem, but it’s an issue on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree, and it certainly wouldn’t be a deal breaker either way.

  4. David Foster Says:

    Hi Alan….I would bet that if any Republican–certainly if Donald Trump–were to propose such a ban in the US, then most of the people in question would denounce it as Islamophobic.

    I also suspect that most of the people who are so anti-Trump that they would consider leaving the country would also be unpleasantly surprised by France’s heavy use of nuclear power for electrical generation.

  5. Alan Allport Says:

    David, such a ban in the United States would be unconstitutional. Period, as Mr. Spicer is fond of saying. France has a different legal context.

  6. Alan Allport Says:

    And while I’m sure there might be a few hypothetical migrants who would be shocked at your list of “50 Ways France Will Make Your Liberal Flesh Creep”, I suspect rather more of them might greet it with a shrug.

  7. David Foster Says:

    Alan, it would *probably* be found unconstitutional in the US, but on the other hand, there is a precedent in anti-mask laws which were put in place to fight the Ku Klux Klan.

  8. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Yes – I think the constitutionality question is not entirely straightforward.

  9. Alan Allport Says:

    A ban on private citizens wearing certain types of religious garb? No, that’s pretty straightforward.

  10. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Alan: I think the squishiness would be about specific circumstances and settings (photo ID is the prime example). Also: There’s a very strong argument to be made that the full veil is not religious – unless you want to argue that everything someone calls religious is religious because they say so… So we’re talking (as in several European and now North African countries) about partial bans. (Some places do have complete bans.) They could extend, for instance, to a variety of public settings.

  11. Alan Allport Says:

    UD: the original statement was about instituting a ban identical to that in France in the US. It seems highly unlikely that such a broad prohibition, disproportionately affecting one particular faith group, would pass First Amendment muster. Some other, much more limited kind of restriction might be possible if its language was tailored carefully enough – but that’s not what we were discussing.

  12. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Alan: Ah, okay – I didn’t remember that the subject was a total ban.

    I do think it’s quite possible that this country could move toward a partial ban.

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