In France, immigration, one of the main concerns of voters, is watering the electoral campaign for the parliamentary elections where the extreme right is ahead: it may not be new, but this “fear of the foreigner” is magnified in a global context of “anxiety” and ” weakness” of the policy, according to researchers.

In an Ipsos poll conducted on June 6-7 on the determinants of the vote in the European elections, which the far-right National Alarm (RN) party won by a wide margin, immigration is “the” main issue for 23% of French people who expected to vote, ahead of purchasing power (18%). For 43% it is one of the three main reasons they vote what they do.

RN has historically made it one of his ‘favorite’ subjects. Its president, Jordan Bardela, who will be a candidate for prime minister if he secures an absolute majority in the National Assembly, regularly unleashes rants against “uncontrolled mass immigration” and mainly wants to suppress the “law of the land”.

France issued a record number of first residence permits last year, 323,250, an increase of 1.4% compared to 2022, while deportations rose sharply (+10%, at least 17,000), according to interior ministry figures.

Anti-immigration rhetoric has all the more resonance, according to the anthropologist Michel Asier, as it has been part of a more general climate of anxiety for twenty years, fueled by “the feeling that we live permanently in insecurity”: natural disasters, various forms of terrorism or death of a state that protects, says the researcher.

“This fear leads to the creation of a scapegoat, but this is nothing new,” observes the director of research at the Graduate School of Social Sciences (EHESS).

Post-colonial legacy

What is new, on the contrary, is, as he says, “the post-colonial legacy which produces a kind of racism that is behind this far-right obsession with immigration issues,” the anthropologist underlines.

“When someone says that there are many immigrants, he is not talking about the Americans, the English, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Ukrainians… He is not talking about whites, while the latter come in very large numbers (…) but they are not accepted in the same way,” says the expert on the globalization of people’s relations with exile.

According to the national statistics institute (Insee), in 2022 seven million immigrants lived in France, i.e. 10.3% of the total population and 35% of them had acquired French citizenship (2.5 million).

Less than half, 48.2% of immigrants were born in Africa and 32.3% were born in Europe. Of these, most were born in Algeria (12.5%), Morocco (11.9%), Portugal (8.2%), Tunisia (4.7%), Italy (4.0%), states Insee.

Moreover, according to Azier, the loss of community points of reference together with the dispersal of families and the development of individualism lead to folding into the self. “Since the 1990s, almost everywhere in the world, the state has largely disengaged and given citizens the impression that they are less protected by it,” he observes.

Weak opponents

A finding shared by Suani Poto, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), who speaks of a feeling of socio-economic fragility. “The foreigner embodies the globalization associated with relocations, wage reductions and the position of workers in competition on an international scale.”

“Unable to face this globalization, the political sphere, far beyond the extreme right, seizes on immigration issues because it shows that it can act with concrete measures, thereby reassuring its ability to make decisions,” he estimates.

“Immigrants are the weak opponents, those who do not have a political voice (…), contrary to the economy,” says the sociologist specializing in immigration issues.

Since 1980, 29 immigration laws have been recorded in France, one every 17 months, recalls the Museum of Migration History.

But stigmatizing a population and pushing it into illegality by tightening the rules on settling in France, in the belief that it will deter migrants from coming to the country, has the opposite effect and hinders their integration, aid organizations regularly point out. the immigrants.

“These people will not have the right to work legally, to reside, to receive medical care, and this develops an informal economy that favors criminal behavior,” observes Suani Poto.

“It would be enough to stop feeding this fear and to transfer the politics to other issues so that the fear will disappear by itself. The rejection of the foreigner is by no means unchanged,” he estimates.