The president of the party Les Républicains Eric Ciotti made the link between immigration and delinquency, during the 8:30 am of franceinfo Wednesday June 14. But it is based on figures that raise questions and must be taken with great caution.
Can we establish a direct link between immigration and delinquency? This is the question that was asked to Eric Ciotti during the 8:30 interview on franceinfo, Wednesday June 14. “It’s not me who does it, it’s the Minister of the Interiorreplied the president of the Les Républicains party. You remember the figures given by the Minister of the Interior: 50% of those questioned in the big cities of Lyon, Paris and Marseille are foreigners. It’s not a judgement, it’s a fact and you can’t fight the facts.”
Immigration and security: There is an “over-representation” of foreigners in prisons, according to Eric Ciotti, president of the Les Républicains party, who believes that “there are too many foreigners who cannot be integrated and that there We must limit migratory flows” pic.twitter.com/tD0VJFHIu9
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) June 14, 2023
Indeed, we cannot fight against the facts, but it is always good to check them and explain them, especially when it comes to figures that must be taken with great caution.
40% to 50% of those arrested are foreigners
In August 2022, almost a year ago, the Minister of the Interior had indeed indicated in an interview with the Sunday newspaper that 48% of those arrested in Paris were foreigners, 55% in Marseille and 39% in Lyon. The Parisian figure, reused by Emmanuel Macron in the fall, had been confirmed by the Paris police headquarters to franceinfo and only related to the first months of the year 2022. The other two could not be confirmed and the data is not public.
But, contrary to what the president of the Les Républicains party asserts, Gérald Darmanin does not make the link between immigration and delinquency. He said it clearly in November 2022: these implicated foreigners are “a tiny part of foreigners, so I don’t make a link between immigration and delinquency”.
Figures to relativize
However, these figures should be taken with a grain of salt because they do not give an exhaustive view of crime. First, Gérald Darmanin also said that many foreign offenders were repeat offenders, so some people may have been arrested several times during the same period and counted several times by the authorities, which distorts the percentages given.
In the same way, it is possible that several people were arrested for the same facts, the figures of the arrested do not therefore necessarily correspond to the figures of offenses and crimes. Conversely, not all offenses result in arrests.
But above all, as Eric Ciotti says, these figures only speak of people “challenged”, who have not been sentenced – either because they are awaiting trial or because they have not been prosecuted – so, potentially, in these 40% or 50% of foreigners among those arrested, it there are dozens of innocent people. And in fact, the proportion of foreigners among the condemned is much lower. According to the Ministry of Justice, in 2022, foreigners represented only 16% of convicts.
Some will say that there is nevertheless an over-representation of foreigners since there are proportionally more than twice as many foreigners among those sentenced in France as foreigners among the general population (7.7%). But in reality, it is impossible to compare the share of foreigners among convicts with that of foreigners among the general population, because these two indicators do not refer to the same groups of people. When INSEE counts foreigners in the overall population, it counts foreigners in a legal situation, who have a visa or have requested asylum. Some foreigners who have been arrested, in an irregular situation, are therefore not counted by INSEE. They go under the radar.
Crime related to poverty
It is also important to shed light on what is charged against these convicted foreigners. According to the International Prison Observatory, 99.6% of convictions of foreigners were for misdemeanors, not crimes. According to INSEE, in 2019, foreigners are mainly implicated for economic and financial attacks, such as clandestine work, counterfeiting, and for theft.
A delinquency “typical of popular circles”, according to the Institut convergences migrations which depends on the CNRS, linked to the lack of money and means rather than to nationality. It is also the most visible and most repressed delinquency.
Several studies also show that foreigners are on the one hand more controlled by the forces of order, and on the other hand more severely condemned by justice. According to INSEE, 31% of foreign convicts are in prison, against 22% of French convicts.