Benoît Hamon said that 15% of business creators were foreigners, during an interview with franceinfo, Monday June 12, concluding that they were “overrepresented” in this category.
It is a discourse that comes to counter the small ambient air opposed to immigration or for its regulation. Interviewed on franceinfo Monday June 12, Benoît Hamon, former presidential candidate of 2017 and now general manager of the NGO Singa, which helps refugees and migrants to integrate into society through work, assured that “7.7% of the population in France is foreign, of all business creators, 15% are foreign. There is therefore an overrepresentation of foreigners in business creation”. A way for him to demonstrate that immigration brings a lot to France. So, true or false ?
Immigration: “There is a tradition in France which dates from the Third Republic, according to which, the meeting with foreigners must lead to France remaining intact. It is assimilationism”, “regrets”, the DG of the NGO Singa, Benoît Hamon, who defends “inclusion”. pic.twitter.com/y09erzVr7L
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) June 12, 2023
Foreigners proportionally more numerous among business creators
Benoît Hamon is basically telling the truth: there are indeed more foreigners among business creators in France than there are among the general population (7.7% according to INSEE), they are therefore overrepresented. Nevertheless, the figure of 15% that he puts forward can be nuanced.
It comes from a study by Legalstart, a website that helps future entrepreneurs in legal and administrative matters in France and since May in Morocco, via the Legafrik site, already present in Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Senegal and Burkina Faso. In its French branch, the site had helped 200,000 new entrepreneurs between its creation in 2014 and 2021.
He had then decided to make his own statistics so that the entrepreneurial dynamism of foreigners is included in the debates on immigration and it appeared that 15% of business creators who had gone through Legalstart were of foreign nationality, as reported by the site Undertake , especially Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Portuguese then Italians, and launched themselves into the sectors of transport, sales, construction or the Internet. Contacted by franceinfo, Legalstart updated its data to include the years 2022 and 2023. The site has now helped 350,000 entrepreneurs and 14% of them were of foreign nationality. The figure is therefore fairly stable.
Nevertheless, some could argue that, according to Legalstart, only one in ten business creators asks for help, so its estimates do not allow for an overall view.
About 10% according to INSEE
There is actually another indicator, hidden in the discrete INSEE databases. By analyzing the data on the profiles of business creators, we see that nearly 10% of them (9.8% exactly) were of foreign nationality in 2018 in France (last year available). More than half of these foreign business creators come from outside the European Union. This figure is up slightly since it stood at 9.4% in 2014 and 8.6% in 2010. The INSEE figures therefore confirm that, proportionally, foreigners are overrepresented among business creators.
To have a broader vision of the place of people with an immigrant background in the business world, it is good to add other indicators that no longer speak of those who created a business in such and such a year. , but of those who run one on a daily basis, year after year. According to INSEE, 8.2% of craftsmen, traders and business leaders are of foreign nationality in France and 4.6% are also from iimmigration, houset obtained French nationality.
La Dares, the statistics service of the Ministry of Labour, notes in its report on immigration professions that “immigrants are more often self-employed, as craftsmen, shopkeepers, or even entrepreneurs” than non-immigrants. In other words, 8% of immigrants (foreign or not) run a business compared to 6% of French people who are not direct immigrants.
Positive effects on the French economy
The Museum of the History of Immigration explains on its website that foreigners have been setting up businesses in France for a long time. In the 1920s, 15% of Parisian companies had been created by foreigners. We also find figures around 10% in old reports from the former Ministry of Immigration from the early 2000s.
In an article on its website, the museum explains that foreigners often do not manage to climb the ladder in the world of work, that they are confined to the positions of workers, performers and that, consequently, the entrepreneurship appears as a way for them to advance their careers and climb the social ladder.
This entrepreneurial dynamism of foreigners is also one of the reasons why many studies believe that immigration has positive effects on the French economy, as explained by Ekrame Boubtane, lecturer at Clermont Auvergne University. at Cerdi, on the Vie publique site, or as the professor at Mines Paris-PSL Philippe Mustar points out in a column in the newspaper The world in November 2022.