1 Immigration’s to blame: this, like the famous Molière line “it’s his lung, his lung I tell you,” is the stock response we hear from contemporary avatars of Dr Diafoirus as they attempt to cure poor France (this latter-day malade imaginaire) of her supposed ailments.

2 The issue of immigration, in conjunction with issues of security and the survival of the nation state, has been an obligatory part of the “little narrative” heard on campaign trails across the representative democracies of Europe since the 1980s. In France, the more the candidates in the 2022 presidential election speak in terms of a “grand narrative,” or in terms simply of greatness, the more they are obliged to make do with an extremely “little narrative,” with a sleight of hand in fact, that takes the form of a three-note basso continuo that they play endlessly like some obsessive dirge.

3 The tune played by these would-be serpents of Europe’s far-right to charm the sparrows of the popular electorate always sounds the same: (1) the economic and military downgrading of their country in a globalized world; (2) the social and cultural “great replacement” (it’s no longer our home!); (3) the decline of the nation state, with the European Union encroaching ever more into areas of decision-making that were traditionally core elements of national sovereignty, alongside the growing assertiveness of separatist demands (Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica, the Basque Country).

4 Immigration, or rather the cumulative effect today of migrations that have occurred since the 1950s, is always the argument of last resort whenever nationalists, neo-fascists, antisemites, or Catholic or Protestant fundamentalists find themselves marginalized, exhausted, or sidelined.

5 The economic downgrading of the nation state is due, they tell us, to de-industrialization: the power of blue-collar workers, small businesspeople, and artisans has apparently been eroded by the dual effects of offshoring and an influx of foreign workers, which has supposedly led to more specialization in low-paid jobs (in the industrial sector, but in services too). “Corrèze before Zambezi!” was one of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s favorite slogans back in 1985–1995—a precursor to “national preference.”

6 The social and cultural “great replacement”: in a country where regional languages (Breton, Corsican, Occitan, Provençal, Alsatian, Basque, Picard) were sacrificed on the altar of a Jacobin policy of assimilation, and where local culture is confined to the margins of any society that speaks anything other than standard French, the arrival on the scene of other languages, other religions, and other cultures has become intolerable for many who have just one single model of education in their heads, that of assimilation. It’s a model so deeply ingrained in the French psyche that the descendants of immigrants or of regional minorities in turn become some of its staunchest defenders. It is worth noting too that Jacobinism evolved from the centralism and statism of the Capetian dynasty; hence, the attitude toward religious minorities (Jewish, Protestant) was profoundly shaped by the Counter-Reformation. In social, cultural, political, and religious matters, the rule of the majority was imposed on minorities in practice, although the latter enjoyed a right to freedom of conscience. The Gregorian calendar of religious feast days is Catholic, or Christian. Republicans citing the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church (the Catholic Church) and State and the doctrine of laïcité would of course tell you that there’s nothing to see here! But it remains the case that, when France became a republic, there was nothing in its DNA to tell it how to respect minorities in circumstances where no single group has absolute majority in cultural or in religious terms.

7 Now, European integration means there is no longer just one language, one de facto religion (with a smattering of other faiths), one capital city, one administration. For the French, this is a real revolution: How do you govern when no single homogeneous group is in the majority? Other European countries—Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany—experienced this tectonic shift at different moments in their history. For Germany, the foundations of European multiculturalism were laid by the treaties of Westphalia and Osnabrück at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and by the federal constitutions that established the Weimar Republic and, later, West Germany. Within the political club to which France now belongs, monoculturalism and all those republican notions of assimilation are no longer the rule, accepted automatically without question. The government of the majority is democratic (which means it must respect the rights of minorities and their expression); it is neither republican (one and indivisible) nor national populist.

8 That unfortunately very French sentiment of the “great replacement” has little to do with any economic or demographic reality on the ground. It is linked to the breakdown of a republican model that can no longer keep pace with a wider concrete truth (in this case, the European project). And yet the French continue to cling to a rule practiced and promoted by them as the only possible truth. The effect of this in Brussels is clear: the French position comes across as arrogant, particularly to the smaller member states, and, moreover, as lacking the means for its politics. But there is another effect, domestic this time, that has gone unnoticed: the turmoil felt by a monolingual, monocultural, and unknowingly assimilationist culture in a multicultural world, in a political framework that is multiethnic, multinational, and multireligious.

9 This is not just a French problem, however: a number of Eastern countries have, in their recent history, been plunged into a similar situation—even if, in their case, they came from plurilingual imperial alliances. But when Laurent Bouvet came up with the frightening expression “cultural insecurity” so dear to the Printemps républicain movement, what was he communicating other than the feeling that, in having to operate within the federalist framework of the European Union, the French model has somehow been downgraded? Renaud Camus and self-styled rebels like Éric Zemmour fighting for “national reconquest,” or Alain Finkielkraut going on a ridiculous crusade against the language used in the banlieues, focus solely on the finger (the great ethnic and religious “replacement”) when the sage points into the distance to show them the moon (the ineffectiveness of French-style universalism, its provincial nature, its lack of relevance for the immediate future of everyone in the European Union).

10 When you have been educated in the French belief in the sufficiency of the majority (which runs from Rivarol’s Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française to an imperialist, colonialist arrogance that sees such discourse as “irreplaceable”), the idea of a multicultural society is enough to bring you out in spots—a mild rash in times of calm, but otherwise a veritable hysteria of anti-islamo-leftist, anti-intersectional, anti-decolonial, and anti-woke or anti-cancel-culture feeling, as we saw for example in that lamentable symposium at the Sorbonne, rightly denounced by both Sandra Laugier and Elisabeth Roudinesco.

11 We are witnessing a sort of infantile fight, as in the film La Guerre des boutons (War of the Buttons) (1962), an ideological battle waged against windmills, not against the true reality of things. For this, it is not Molière that we need to call upon, but Cervantes. France’s golden age is behind us, but those crusader comedians still don’t seem to have taken this on board.

12 This whole furor, blown out of all proportion to the point where accusations of lèse-majesté against the Republic have been bandied about, is nothing more than a storm in a teacup.

13 The immigration of foreigners who differ in some way from the majority “stock” (the terminology varies depending on the level of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, or “enracinement” [rootedness], to borrow Maurice Barrès’s term, which was widely used from the 1890s to the 1940s) has come to be seen as the cause of this feeling that some kind of downgrading has occurred, some sort of cultural, political, or religious “replacement”—in short, this sense of “cultural insecurity” for which people seek causes that are detached from material reality [hors-sol], even though they go on and on demanding their little “local” garden.

14 In his excellent short book Le grand enfumage: Populisme et immigration dans sept pays européens (L’Aube, 2022), Hervé Le Bras uses an in-depth study of the electoral progress of xenophobic, populist, and far-right parties to show that their greatest electoral successes do not come in places where immigrant numbers (recent or long-standing) are highest. Instead, they come in areas where the local population fears a possible influx of foreigners. For example, Brachay, a village in the Haute-Marne department where Marine Le Pen won 90 percent of the vote in 2017, has not a single immigrant among its ninety-two inhabitants. This fits with findings by sociologists from the Chicago school, who observed that the most racist neighborhoods in the United States were not those with the largest Black population, but those with the smallest. In areas of high immigration here in Europe, we see the emergence of much more tolerant multicultural urban societies that find new ways to achieve better social integration and that don’t simply continue harboring unfounded stereotypes.

15 From the foothold gained in these fiefdoms where immigration is non-existent, the fledgling populism then spreads out into regions affected by de-industrialization or where the blue-collar workforce has been displaced by migrants. After that, immigration becomes the joker card allowing populist movements to attract new support bases or shift focus according to the specifics of their own particular story (that of their leader, the specific region where they’ve gained a foothold, or the arrival on the scene of anti-European sovereigntism à la Brexit).

16 It would be naïve to lay the blame for this development—the way immigration has been cast as the fount of all ill—solely at the door of the antisemitic far-right (be it religious, nationalist, or conservative). We have already mentioned the part played by the universalist and republican Left; Printemps républicain has moved to the right on the questions of laïcité and integration. But the traditional Left has played its part too. We all remember the awful statement Laurent Fabius made: “The Front National asks the right questions but gives the wrong answers.” Less well remembered are the abhorrent utterances from Georges Marchais and the communist and trade unionist Left during the strike at the Sonacotra migrant centers in Vitry. More generally, the theory that migrants swell the industrial reserve army and create competition between workers has left its mark among the working classes, particularly those who changed their vote from communist to Front National in the period between 1975 and 1995.

17 As for the “right questions” that the Front National or the Rassemblement National, or the likes of Zemmour, Asselineau, Philippot, and Ciotti, are supposedly asking, we need to hold a mirror up to them. “You think you’re talking about immigrants, but you’re actually talking about yourself.” The failure to integrate immigrants into French society, especially immigrants of color or of other faiths (read Muslim), is in fact a reflection of a number of serious questions that only indirectly relate to migrants. First, the ineffectiveness of the French integration model, with its deep-seated anti-communitarianism, stems from an underestimation of the role played in the socialization of the individual by the family, by group(s) of belonging that exist within political structures such as the nation or federations. Second, an education system that already falls well short when it comes to democratizing access to higher education (post-baccalauréat)—due to a republican elitism that was no doubt progressive in 1880 but that is now clearly outdated—is especially incapable of accommodating the children of low-paid or poorly skilled workers (as many migrants are). Rather than fussing over the first names of second- or third-generation migrants, [1] the national education system and the continuing education scheme for refugees—no matter their legal status—should instead be focusing attention on each individual school drop-out that happens as a result of racial, economic, ethnic, or religious discrimination. It is hard for Gallic pride, bathing as it does in the warm glow of its universalism free in theory from color, faith, or gender bias, to acknowledge the merit of affirmative action policies. But high crime rates in those parts of the country regarded as “red zones” (which the areas inhabited by the so-called “dangerous” classes always are)—together with other clues indicating the presence of seedbeds for radicalization and hate directed at the French Republic and at a “France of unbelievers”—prompt us to consider more carefully what a real integration policy might look like, as opposed to all those pie-in-the-sky pronouncements on assimilation.

18 On a more general note, concerning immigration and its general economy in the political arena, and the absurd blurring of issues that the likes of Zemmour and other scaremongers exploit in order to gain votes, it is worth noting here a few points that will need to be explored in more depth if we are to get out of this mess and stop regurgitating the same old obsessions.

19 1. Migration across geographical and political boundaries is the rule, and indeed has been throughout the Anthropocene epoch. Attempts to block migration—which are invariably aborted—are the exception, and they generally end up costing dear, and may even, in extreme cases, lead to genocide. Rationally speaking, it can only ever be a question of managing migration flows in ways that are acceptable both to the migrants themselves and to the host country. In consequence, from an ecological and human perspective, there is a global right to migrate (a right of free departure), even if countries systematically restrict the right to settle.

20 2. The autonomy of international migration, vis-à-vis the policies by which states seek to control international and intranational migration, needs to be recognized much more extensively than it has been in the past. It was partially recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Status of Refugees, and the Helsinki Accords, and in the acknowledgment of the right to family reunification guaranteed, in Europe at least, by the European Court of Human Rights. Incidentally, measures restricting family reunification, or allowing for the deportation of children of migrants (even those whose parents have been convicted of a criminal offense) or of migrants with dual nationality, are not an option—short of overturning the rule of law, which, in democracies at least, is not reducible to the will of the people expressed in elections or referenda.

21 3. International migrants are not necessarily the product of abject poverty (the very poorest are often unable to leave their homeland) nor of forced expulsion. The “pull” factor is stronger than the “push” factor. Presenting immigration in terms of poverty serves neither the migrants themselves, nor their host society—which already tends to view them with all the goodwill reserved for outcastes in India. Charitable assistance provided to migrants by non-governmental and/or religious organizations is key, given the frequent lack of state support, even in ostensibly democratic countries. But such initiatives must not have the effect of turning the migrant, a free citizen of the world, into an impoverished client, part of a new underclass.

22 4. Policies to erect walls, either around the outside of a political entity (the territory of a nation state, a confederation, or a federation) or on the inside (work permit and visa systems tantamount almost to slavery), are not optimal. They’re a euphemism. They give permission for de facto abuses to occur, for those endless discrepancies between the theory and reality of how migrants are treated.

23 5. Attempts in the European Union to outsource migration control, either to the country of origin or to the country of arrival, give rise to constant violations of the rights mentioned in point 2. The ignominious attempts at blackmail by the dictator of Belarus, directing de facto refugees toward the Polish border, or by Erdoğan in Turkey provide illustration enough of this effect. It is likely that the wall to be built in Poland will be ineffective, not to mention the irreparable damage it will do to the environment.

24 6. Between the 1970s and the 2000s, it was thought that policies aimed at encouraging economic development would reduce migratory pressure, particularly in the Mediterranean region. Lionel Stoléru, immigration minister under Giscard d’Estaing, ventured unwisely onto this terrain. But back then, one very important condition was neglected: that of timeframes. Economic development tends to reduce both the “push” factor and the “pull” factor for those who might be thinking of migrating to a developed country. But in the short and medium term, it frees up a huge number of workers, especially in the countryside—workers who, if they are given the chance, will choose to head abroad rather than to the cities in their own country.

25 7. It is clear today that, with the increase in problems associated with climate change—the rise in water levels in urbanized areas or areas of intensive farming, a shortage of water available for irrigation, conflicts between nomadic and sedentary farmers over the use of water, civil wars like the one in Myanmar—migratory pressure is not going to decrease. This is yet another reason to take our heads out of the sand and to add the status of “climate refugee” to the other refugee statuses, such as those linked to political persecution or civil war.

26 8. It remains the case, though, that the “pull” factor is still the main one driving international migration. The reason that thousands of migrants rush to Calais to cross the English Channel is that it is easier to find a job in Britain (let’s not talk about job protection). The curbs on migration from the European Union following Brexit will make the substitution of EU residents by undocumented Afghans, Syrians, etc., all the more apparent.

27 9. Integration policies—through education (classes teaching the host country’s language), professional training, access to proper housing, and political participation (voting rights)—are as essential today to the future of democracies as the integration of the working classes was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Three unavoidable conclusions

28 European populism considerably weakens democracy and the pursuit of a federal European Union.

29 Mistakes around international migration have weakened the Left, in democracies where the interests of all groups are supposed to be represented through the ballot box. Depriving migrants of the right to vote until they have become naturalized introduces considerable bias into the democratic system, which populist movements have exploited to the hilt. Which group can you attack without any fear of alienating potential supporters? Migrants who don’t have a vote. They become useful scapegoats for those who want to flatter the “indigenous stock.”

30 Lastly, states’ failure to appreciate the realities of migration lead them to adopt illusory policies, such as the quota system (quantitative) or the points system (qualitative), which have met with very little success.

31 With migratory pressure as high as it is—and this was the case throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is it realistic to think that the glimpse into the abyss provided by the sight of a drowned child on a beach in Lesbos (intolerable for anyone with an ounce of humanity left in them) will have the slightest deterrent effect?

32 Nor will these migrants be particularly put off by the dirty tricks of the police, who tirelessly confiscate tents, dinghies, and personal possessions and block access to sources of water for those preparing to cross the Channel. When you’ve seen so much horror in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or witnessed massacres caused by religious terrorism in the Sahel, the behavior of authorities seeking to block your passage has little effect. This ignominious behavior (on our part) has been coldly assessed (by them) in their risk calculations. Despite there being a 5 percent chance of death (which is intolerable), it remains a risk worth taking.

33 And let us not imagine that this is an exception in history; for ship-owners from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (including those involved in the diabolical slave trade) faced a 10 percent risk of shipwreck, with the possibility of their ship, their cargo, and their men all being lost without a trace.

34 These families, mothers, and small children, these young people who risk crossing the Mediterranean, or the Atlantic, or the English Channel, are thus not overly frightened by the mean tactics of border guards or the police. At most, they may feel scorn for them, and for their bosses. Let us not take migrants for a poor, cowering flock. That would be to add insult to injury.