Paris ‘Muslim Spider-Man’ Saves Young Boy. Cue Debate on Migrants. ( in English ) , France President to give him citizenshipf

Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant from Mali, scaled four balconies of a building in Paris before pulling a child to safety.

Credit

actu buzz, via YouTube

By Aurelien Breeden and Alan Cowell

PARIS — The 4-year-old boy seemed to be suspended from a balcony. An adult standing on a nearby balcony seemed powerless to help. Disaster seemed the only possible outcome.

                                                    CLICK AND JOIN

Then, to the nimble rescue on the streets of Paris on Saturday evening, came a young man whom some French people have started to call the Spider-Man of the 18th, referring to the arrondissement of Paris where the episode unfolded.

With a combination of grit, agility and muscle, the man hauled himself hand over hand from one balcony to another, springing from one parapet to grasp the next one up. A crowd that had gathered before he began his daring exploit urged him ever upward, according to onlookers’ video that was shared widely on social media.

Finally, after scaling four balconies, the man reached the child and pulled him to safety. And suddenly, an act of individual courage and resourcefulness began to play into Europe’s fraught and polarized debate about outsiders, immigrants and refugees.

The man, identified as Mamoudou Gassama, 22, is a migrant from Mali, a troubled former French colony in northwest Africa, who journeyed through Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya before making the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing to Italy and arriving in France in September, without documentation.

On Monday, after his heroic rescue of the boy, he met with President Emmanuel Macron. Now, he will get the requisite documentation to live legally in France.

“I told him that in recognition of his heroic act he would have his papers in order as quickly as possible,” Mr. Macron said in a statement on Facebook after meeting with Mr. Gassama at the Élysée Palace in Paris.

Mr. Gassama will be one of a lucky few in a country with increasingly tightimmigration rules and a generally skeptical attitude toward migrants who are seeking primarily economic benefits.

In 2017, only five people were granted residency papers for “exceptional talent” or “services rendered to the community,” according to statisticsfrom the French Interior Ministry. In 2016, there were six.

President Emmanuel Macron of France meeting with
 Mamoudou Gassama at the Élysée Palace in Paris on 
Monday. Mr. Gassama scaled four stories of a building
 in the French capital to save a young child hanging
 from a balcony.CreditPool photo by Thibault Camus


- The New York Times