from the majority to the opposition, everyone claims to be in the camp of “common sense”!

In the Senate, the right-wing majority has toughened the text on immigration. Passionate debates this week. The debates are, as always, heated when a government legislates on this politically explosive issue, which happens very often. This is also the case in the Senate, an assembly that is usually more peaceful. But the context is heavy, marked almost everywhere in Europe by a migratory surge and a parallel rise of the extreme right. As a result, this year, even more than in previous times, the majority and the oppositions are fighting over the same totem: everyone claims to be in the camp of “common sense”!

Starting with the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, in the name of a formula that he has often repeated, he wants “be mean to the wicked”, the foreign delinquents he wants to expel, and “kind to the nice”, undocumented workers in shortage occupations that it intends to regularize. Except that his own political, or rather arithmetic, common sense, the quest for a majority, leads him to give in to the right which unravels his text, for example by transferring to the prefects the regularization, “exceptionally” of undocumented immigrants. It is in the name of this same so-called “common sense” that the right is demanding, in unison with the far right, a referendum on immigration. A debate that Emmanuel Macron himself intends to open in the long term. He also undoubtedly responds to a “common sense” reflex which consists of wanting to consult the French.

Economic realities and public aspirations

The same argument is used by the other side. It is, for example, the one who encourages the boss of the Union of Hotel Industries Trades, Thierry Marx, to plead for the regularization of undocumented immigrants without whom his sector cannot operate. The same motive leads the left to be indignant at the reduction in the scope of medical aid granted to undocumented immigrants, a decision which risks creating a dangerous health crisis for those concerned, and beyond in the country, as we saw him in Spain a few years ago.

Basically, this totem of “common sense” brandished by everyone shows that on immigration, political leaders are looking for a compass. They first seek to adhere to what they think are the aspirations of public opinion. Not easy when it is itself, according to surveys, divided according to the measures in question. A sign that immigration is a complex subject which cuts across very diverse human situations, far from the simplistic slogans proclaimed by demagogues.