Immigration and delinquency are two controversial subjects which are not among the priorities of the French, who are more concerned about their purchasing power. But the electoral context led the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour to mobilize on these divisive themes. His campaign strategy leads him to make immigration the primary cause of all the country’s ills, starting with delinquency, even if it means manipulating the figures, and making them say what they don’t say.
It is ” statistically incontrovertible “. According to Éric Zemmour, delinquency is ” the consequence of mad immigration “. He said so on the Public Senate channel. He returns to it on Twitter using graphs using data from various sources – Ministry of Justice on the one hand, but also the Interior and National Institute of Statistics – a mixture that is difficult to verify.
For example, one of the graphs combining data supposed to come from Insee and the Ministerial Statistical Service for Internal Security (SSMSI), indicates that 38% of violent unarmed thefts are committed by foreigners, including 33 % having the nationality of an African country, while there are 10% foreigners in the general population. This leads him to affirm that zero immigration would cause the disappearance of delinquent acts.
But this exploitation of the figures does not take into account the warnings of the organization which publishes them, and in particular the fact that people initially identified as foreigners can also hold French nationality.
Furthermore, these data reflect in particular the work of the judicial police on organized crime and its networks, involving around ten nationalities worldwide. These criminal organizations actually recruit foreigners in France as part of international human trafficking. The main suspects are nevertheless essentially French, as established in the SSMSI report published in December 2021. This sheds a completely different light on the figures presented by candidate Zemmour. If the overrepresentation of foreigners is proven, it must be qualified.
Correlation is not causation
Above all, the rest of the reasoning seems fallacious in more ways than one. Éric Zemmour introduces a bias when he establishes a causal link between the fact that there are immigrants in France and the fact that there is delinquency. He makes numbers say what they don’t say, and confuses correlation and causation. This allows him to evacuate any other explanatory factor.
The use of poorly sourced simplistic graphics is also a way of influencing the Internet user, especially since the red used to designate the foreigner reinforces the alarmist character of the message.
Éric Zemmour goes further by alluding to the ” children of immigrants “, because according to him, almost all acts of delinquency are attributable not only to immigrants, but also to their children. Reason why he advocates the abolition of the law of the ground. However, there are no ethnic statistics in France to support this argument. The compilation of ethnic statistics is in itself a very controversial subject and controlled by lawbecause of the instrumentalization to which they could be subjected.
The hammering of untruths
Eric Zemmour decided to do immigration ” the mother of all battles “. It has already earned him a convictionwhen he called unaccompanied migrant minors “thieves”, “murderers” and “rapists”, just as Donald Trump had done before being elected.
Like the former American president, he uses the technique of hammering untruths or misleading arguments. The objective is to make an impression with simplistic, even erroneous, assertions which – by dint of being repeated – have some chance of imposing themselves in the minds of part of the public. The very fact of having to restore the truth gives visibility to the lie. It is the deliberate strategy of using an alternative narrative, which has become a mode of communication capable of vitiating democratic debate.