No offense to a good part of the political left, the question of immigration remains anchored in the minds of its voters whose positions on the matter are hardening, and in particular among the less well-off among them. With its realities and fantasies, that is no longer the subject. It would not be enough to talk about immigration in one piece – in the millenarian way of the extreme right, or angelic of the Nupes. This, the French, including those on the left, no longer hear.
In France, the debate on immigration, which will be entitled to its umpteenth law in a few months, boils down too much to the number of regularizations of illegal immigrants. The question posed to our country, and which the left should seize on the leap, is above all that of the integration model. But there too, the shoe pinches. The Insoumis and EELV too often consider it as a command, if not an assimilationist coercion, consisting in imposing values and a way of life on foreigners who want to become French.
Bigot
Who, on the left, wonders why integration has failed, this “French genius” said Michel Rocard, who makes national cohesion the essential base for the acceptance of cultural and religious particularities? The disorganized management of migratory flows has become a French anxiety, the results of which can be seen in two facts: Marine Le Pen in the second round in 2017 and in 2022. Learning the language, secularism and integration through work are not not alienations. To integrate poorly is to add misfortune to France and to those it welcomes.
Robespierre, who was not an extreme right bigot, wrote in the Constitution of 1793: “Any foreigner domiciled in France, who lives there from his work […]judged by the legislative body to have deserved well of humanity, is admitted to the exercise of the rights of French citizenship.” There are not too many immigrants in France, but too many sent to the same places, poorly integrated or who refuse to be. Being able to say it should not be a taboo. Some in the PS and elsewhere, like François Ruffin, aspire to put this on the agenda of the left. How many will try to prevent them?