E. Europeans See Paris, Then Look for Work

Roland Bedryj is a French-speaking guide and bus driver who conducts very low-budget tours of Paris for a travel agency in southeast Poland.

For about $125 for a five-day tour, the mustachioed, blond Pole with a taste for pungent French black-tobacco cigarettes drives his no-frills, no-video, no-air conditioning, no-bathroom 42-passenger bus from the sugar-beet city of Bielawa to the City of Light.

His mostly young tourists sleep in student hostels and eat home-made sandwiches on the bus. Bedryj himself narrates visits to the famous monuments: the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Pompidou Center and Napoleon’s tomb.

But when the time comes to go back to Poland, he said, there are always “two or three or sometimes as many as 10” people missing from the group. “A lot of the young people come here with the intention to stay,” Bedryj said in an interview beside his bus on the tourist-jammed Place de la Concorde. “They are taking a risk, trying their chances at finding work.”

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the number of East European tourists coming to Paris and other Western capitals has increased multifold. Nowhere is the Eastern wave more obvious than here in the French capital. Rickety, smoke-belching Polish, Czechoslovak and Romanian buses compete for space on the Champs Elysees with sleek German and Italian coaches.

Among the 25 or so buses parked alongside the Louvre Museum on a recent afternoon were nine from Poland, five from Czechoslovakia and one from Hungary.

Many of the Eastern Europeans, pinched for money and unable to afford the steep Paris prices, sleep in their buses at night at the base of the Eiffel Tower or in the campgrounds of the sprawling Bois de Boulogne. This is what one Czechoslovak travel agency, Tip-Tour of Bratislava, calls the “Paris camp tour”--offered at a rate of seven days for $133.

Under reciprocal agreements with France and most other West European countries, the East Europeans can travel freely as tourists, without visas, for three months.

But what recently has begun to concern the French government is that many of them overstay their welcome, melting into the already brimming, clandestine immigrant population.

“It is an established fact,” said an official with the French Ministry of the Interior, “that a certain number of people from the East come in as tourists but do not leave when they are scheduled to go.”

Unlike Arab, Asian and African immigrants, the East Europeans can blend more easily into the population. They also face little of the prejudice and racism suffered by African immigrants. “The Europeans are better able to integrate than the North Africans,” said the Interior Ministry official.

As tourists, the Eastern Europeans bring little money into the French economy. “They come with their own buses, their own guides and their own food,” complained Francois Chateau, a group tour specialist with the Transtour travel agency in Paris. “Their guides know only a little about what they are showing and fabricate the rest. The people spend only a little here, mostly for small souvenirs.”

The expensive boutiques and fashion houses on Avenue Montaigne and Rue Faubourg St. Honore are the domain of affluent Japanese and American tourists. East Europeans are more likely to be found in discount clothing stores like Tati in Montmartre, where they join Arab and other immigrants in picking through piles of manufacturers’ rejects for bargains.

But what the East Europeans have begun to contribute to the French economy is an abundant supply of cheap, illegal labor that operates “in the black”--outside the French social welfare system that requires employers to contribute more than 40% of a worker’s salary to various health and retirement programs.

Recently, the French national police conducted raids on workplaces in the Paris area, including the huge Euro Disneyland construction site at Marne La Vallee. The raid netted dozens of illegal Polish workers, including a former diplomat at the Polish Embassy in Paris.

The police estimated that one Paris construction company alone had hired as many as 3,000 illegal Eastern Europeans.

According to an investigative report in the muckraking Paris newspaper, Le Canard Enchainee, the illegal workers were paid an average of $800 a month, about $500 below the normal wage for construction workers doing similar jobs.

As in the United States, the construction industry is one of the main employers of clandestine laborers. The layers of contractors and subcontractors on major projects make checking difficult for labor inspectors. In France, the Canard Enchainee estimated, one of every 12 homes is built with this illegal labor. According to the national statistical service, an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion worth of construction is done “black.”

Already confronted with a burning political debate because of immigration from the south--mainly from the Arab states of the North African Maghreb--the French government suddenly finds itself confronted with a new migration of unwanted visitors from the east.

The estimated 3 million Muslim Arab immigrants are likely to be the first ones displaced by the new migrants, who share with the French both religion and European culture.

In its article, the Canard Enchainee quoted a French work site inspector about the relative ease with which illegal Poles find work here: “The Poles are good Christians who melt easily into the masses.”

But even the usually surly park police at the Champs de Mars, the large park at the base of the Eiffel Tower, praise the East Europeans as model visitors.

“We usually have about two or three buses a night,” said an officer on a recent rainy morning. “They are clean, well-disciplined, well-organized people. When they eat, they pick up all their trash. Coming from where they do, they have a real fear of police, so they cause no problems.”

As he spoke, a still-drowsy Polish tourist, Tomasz Januszewski, 18, tumbled out of his bus heading for one of the park fountains to brush his teeth. Januszewski, part of a contingent of traveling handball players, said his only complaint was about French food.

“The portions are too small, especially for breakfast,” he said.

Times Paris Bureau researcher Sarah White and assistant Maya Gorton contributed to this story.