“I have never had a word against immigration,” President Emmanuel Macron explained this week to the communist daily Humanity. This interview was a first in more than one way. First, this president is the first in office to grant an interview to this newspaper, which was the unwavering defender of one of the worst totalitarian regimes in the world.
Then, the formula had the advantage of being clear. Beyond the contradictory speeches of his ministers, who generally only speak of “illegals”, the French president reiterated this profession of faith which has become one of the great dogmas of our time. A government can raise or lower taxes; he can reduce or increase the number of civil servants; he can tackle budget deficits or let them slide; it can increase or decrease military budgets and development aid. But he cannot tackle immigration without moral opprobrium falling on him.
Those who have personal experience can testify that no other subject will earn you such banishment from the field of social respectability. What was once considered a normal political subject, subject to regulation depending on the state of the labor market, the integration of new arrivals and the opinion of voters, has become without question We always understand why the dividing line between Good and Evil, between Vice and Virtue.
Despite the numerous analyzes on the benefits and harms of immigration, the calls for reason from our best political scientists (I am thinking in particular of the analyzes of the philosopher Benoît Dubreuil and the economist Pierre Fortin), immigration remains the great taboo of our time.
No matter how hard we show figures to support the obvious effects of mass immigration on housing, education, crime, social consensus and national identity, nothing works. The question arises from what political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff calls “the cult of the Other”, today dominant among globalized elites. We could see it as an example of those “Christian virtues gone mad” that the visionary Chesterton spoke of. A trend accentuated today by the secularization of our societies, which has completely blurred the distinction between morality and politics.
This is particularly true on the left. For once, the Jean-Jaurès Foundation (close to the French Socialist Party, but also to Renaissance, Emmanuel Macron’s party) recently published a new note entitled The left and immigration. Historical review, strategic perspectives. There we discovered — oh surprise! — that the left had not always idolized immigration.
In this text, socialist activists Bassem Asseh and Daniel Szeftel recall that Marx himself, studying the case of Ireland, considered immigration as a weapon used by capitalists in order to constitute a “reserve army” intended to “lower wages” and degrade “the moral and material condition of the working class”.
Later, the father of French socialism, Jean Jaurès, worried about the massive arrival of agricultural workers in France. “What we do not want is for international capital to seek labor from the markets where it is most degraded, humiliated, depreciated, to throw it without control and without regulation on the French market, and to bring wages all over the world to the level of the countries where they are lowest. » It’s hard to believe that this speech dates from… 1895!
It is in this same tradition intended to protect the working classes that in 1980 the communist mayor of Vitry-sur-Seine, Paul Mercieca, opposed the installation in his commune of Malian workers from the neighboring town (and richest) of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. He will be supported by the general secretary of the French Communist Party, Georges Marchais, who declared on January 6, 1981 that “due to the presence in France of nearly four and a half million immigrant workers and members of their families, the pursuit immigration poses serious problems today. “We must stop official and illegal immigration,” he said.
In a letter to the rector of the Paris mosque, he explained that this immigration created “ghettos” where “workers and families with different traditions, languages and ways of living” were crowded together. This “creates tensions, and sometimes clashes”, and “makes their relations with the French difficult”. Result: “the housing crisis is getting worse” and “education is unable to cope”. It’s 1981!
It was from the 1970s that a moral, gentrified and neoliberal left, underline the authors of the study, became openly multiculturalist and abandoned any idea of regulating immigration.
The National Rally only had to pick up the popular electorate, abandoned by everyone. To the point where it is justified to wonder if, despite the labels that we attach to it, this party is not today part of the tradition of the great popular left-wing parties.
But it is never easy to admit your mistake. This is why, in France, what we still call the left has rather chosen to sink into denial even though half of its voters, although fewer and fewer in number, continue to think that there is too many immigrants in France.
There, as in Quebec, nothing appears more urgent than repatriating immigration from the field of morality to that of politics.