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Notes -
Make revocation of citizenship for crime relatively easy?
I hear far-right commentators excited about revocation of citizenship as if it's the easiest thing when it actually seems like the hardest and most fraught option. Even without the concrete issue of venerable and widely respected international agreements specifically against it, producing an appreciable number of stateless individuals - especially a particularly criminal and undesirable sample of stateless individuals - would be seen as shitting on the international commons. It's not like people on your territory would magically disappear if you revoke their citizenship, and so all you would actually be doing - assuming you don't keep them firmly locked up yourself after revoking their citizenship - is that you would be telling other countries that you will refuse to take responsibility for them or take them back if they somehow make their way into those countries. Doing this would quickly turn you into a pariah state in a way in which no amount of concentration camps, draconian laws or firing squads, targeted against your own, would.
I understand some proponents' attitude towards that would amount to a "so what, sending a big fuck you to the rest of the world is a feature, not a bug"/"if everyone hates us that means more jobs for our people and military", but it seems that many others instead subscribe to a fantasy where if France revokes the citizenship of an nth-generation criminal African then after much wailing and gnashing of teeth some African country nobody can point out on a map will step up and admit that the individual in question is actually theirs (or perhaps that they can run a country-level paternity test that will identify some Equatorial Guinea as on the hook for child support in best reality TV fashion).
International agreements of the 'humanitarian' kind only matter to western nations in any meaningful sense. If they go far right, and it would only take two of the big ones, I don't think anyone will care enough or afford to uphold them.
To that end there would be no problem with France sorting the good from the bad in their society, relegating the bad to some purpose built prison hole in Djibouti.
The point is that it's only superficially about humanitarianism and actually largely about forswearing a type of aggression between roughly equal nation-states that is annoying to defend against.
Who is going to operate the prison hole in Djibouti you are talking about? The Djiboutians would neither be efficient nor incentivised to keep the people in, and would demand a lot of money for it if their internal politics don't randomly whiplash against operating it for any price; for the French running a prison in Djibouti - assuming they can rent the land or muscle themselves into it, which is not so clear - might turn out more expensive than running the same prison in France. (I haven't looked up the operational costs, direct and indirect, of Guantanamo Bay which seems to be the closest equivalent of what you are proposing, but I doubt it's cheaper than your run-of-the-mill federal supermax.)
If the humanitarianism is superficial then what problem are we facing? By the sound of things many on the far right in Europe are not against the EU per se. I don't see why, if we're not maintaining some facade of treating native first worlders and foreign third worlders the same, that the sky will fall as a consequence. European nations can continue working together despite that.
As for Djibouti, the French already have a military base there. Which they could run with an additional prison complex for as cheap as the French can run things overseas given they have the French Foreign Legion stationed there. It would be much less Guantanamo Bay and much more refugee camp you can't leave.
But that's kind of besides the point. I'm not attached to any one mechanism for doing things like that. I mentioned it more in passing than anything. The third world manages to house their criminals. I don't see the task as being impossible or even that hard for France. Nor why it would end up being prohibitively expensive.
If France had third worlders with no land to call home that commit crime, ship 'em out to prisonland.
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Yeah, people also don’t realize just how much many people don’t want to go ‘home’. You’re not going to move to the Ivory Coast or Mali even if stripped of welfare rights. Mild pressure wouldn’t do it.
The UK did recently strip the citizenship of a woman (who joined ISIS) on the basis that she was entitled by ancestry to Bangladeshi citizenship, leaving her arguably stateless in a refugee camp. But doing it on a large scale would be quite different.
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