At the Suzanne Valadon Institute everything is ready to accommodate 120 people sleeping on the streets, many of them immigrants. Folding beds in the classrooms and removable showers have already been installed. It's a gray and rainy Friday in Paris. Neighborhood leaders and politicians came to this previously unoccupied old building with a message: Immigrants must be protected. In any case. Whatever the law, passed this week with the votes of the far right, says, it restricts foreigners' access to some of the benefits of France's robust welfare state. There is someone among those present who cares deeply about these measures.
“I speak to you full of emotions because this is also my story to a certain extent,” said Mayor Anne Hidalgo to the press. She, who was born in Cádiz and came to France at the age of two, is one of the third of French people who have at least one parent or grandparent with a migrant background. He sees a dangerous deviation from the law being pushed forward by President Emmanuel Macron. “France cannot follow this path, it is not the path of its values,” the socialist Hidalgo would later tell EL PAÍS. The president, he denounces, is “preparing Marine Le Pen’s access to power.”
Hidalgo believes so. Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National party, said: “We can look forward to ideological progress, even an ideological victory.” Some leftists argue that by tightening immigration laws, Macron is normalizing Le Pen's ideology. Although he defeated her twice in the presidential election and although they are bitter rivals, he would help her capture the Elysée in the 2027 presidential election. Macron and others in the moderate camp counter this argument with another. To stop the extremist vote, we must directly address the causes of that vote, such as fear of immigration. There would be no better antidote.
From Washington to Paris, Stockholm to Berlin and even Australia, immigration is taking a central place this fall and early winter that it hasn't had in a long time. After years of negotiations, the European Union has just agreed on a migration and asylum pact.
In Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, there were more than six million permanent immigrants in 2022, a record, and a record number of asylum seekers, more than two million. In the EU, this number is on track to reach its highest level since the crisis of 2015 and 2016 in 2023, excluding Ukrainians. The number of irregular migrants arriving across the Mediterranean – and to countries like Spain, where the debate is not as polarized as in the rest of Europe – will also be the highest in recent years.
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But there is still a long way to go from here to talk of a “migration flood” or a “great replacement” of locals by foreigners, as the far right is doing.
“A very insulting vocabulary is used: we would be flooded and immigration would get out of control,” complains François Héran, head of the chair in migration and societies at the Collège de France, an institution that has been at the forefront of science and science since the Renaissance Knowledge of French. And he adds: “Yes, there is progress. But it is not an explosion of asylum applications and immigration.”
Elections in 2024
In this context, there are elections in Europe (for the European Parliament, in several federal states, perhaps in the United Kingdom) and in the USA in 2024. The moderates – the broad spectrum from the social democratic left to the right with Christian democratic roots – are watching with concern the consolidation of the populist, nationalist or extreme right and recent victories such as that of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. And they are responding with new immigration laws.
Not just in France. In Germany, Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced: “We must start deportations on a large scale.” In Sweden, amid violence related to drug trafficking in September, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson declared: “An irresponsible immigration policy has brought us here.” In the United In the Kingdom, the bill to deport migrants to Rwanda is being considered in parliament, while in the United States the right is making aid to Ukraine conditional on more funding to secure the border with Mexico. This is the environment.
On the phone: Patrick Vignal, MP from Macron's party for a district in southern France. “National regrouping cannot be fought with words alone,” he says. “Why am I forcing him to retreat? “I step on the floor.” In towns near Montpellier, Vignal hears concerns about incivility, crime and Islamism. It is fertile ground for Le Pen. He voted for the controversial law.
Macron put it another way: “If we close our eyes and say that there is no immigration problem, we are playing the game of national regroupment.” It is also a discussion on the left that has been observing for years how a part of the popular classes, historically speaking, their adopted homeland is turning en masse to nationalist populism or the extreme right. It happened in the US with Trump. Or in France with Le Pen. In deindustrialized regions, democratic voters, or in France's case communists and socialists, felt abandoned, even despised, by the progressive, urban and multicultural elites.
“Immigration serves as a kind of photographic insight into the social problems of a country,” explains Didier Leschi, director general of the French Office for Immigration and Integration. To this former Trotskyist who still considers himself “a left-wing boy,” we must view immigration as a social problem with implications for our democracies.
“Some European citizens are wondering whether this system can be expanded indefinitely and whether it can accommodate everyone who wants to benefit from it without having made a contribution,” says Leschi in a café on the Place de la Bastille. “If you own real estate, have inherited it or live in a wealthy situation, you don’t worry about it. But for those for whom the welfare state is the only good thing, it is a fear that should not be despised.” And he warns: “The European extreme right has the wind in its sails because it gives the impression that it is on social issues, which makes us forget about their dangerous xenophobia.” In other words: either the democratic forces will take care of this problem, or the extremists will take care of it.
In the conversation, Leschi refers to the Scandinavia case. As a model of the most cosmopolitan social democracy and the most developed welfare state, a country like Sweden is now governed by a coalition supported by the extreme right. In Denmark, the Social Democrats have prevailed with a strict immigration policy.
“If only the extreme right speaks about the problems, people will only look to the extreme right for solutions,” said the social democrat Mattias Tesfaye, son of an Ethiopian mother and a Danish mother and current education minister, to the British newspaper Financial Times in 2019. “I would be If you were a right-wing liberal or in an Anglo-Saxon country, then open borders wouldn’t be a problem for me, but in a Scandinavian welfare state immigration has to be controlled.”
Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany's fashion politician, also refers to Denmark in her speeches. Wagenknecht broke with Die Linke, the sister party of Podemos, and founded his own party. By defending a hard line on immigration policy, he is uncompromisingly wooing voters from the Alternative for Germany, the emerging right-wing extremist party. “Of course there are many people who vote for the AfD not because they are right-wing, but because they are angry and desperate,” he said in an interview with ZDF. “We want to make these people a serious offer.”
fear
It's a message heard in sections of the left across the West. In the United States, Senator John Fetterman supported presidential candidate Bernie Sanders against centrist Hillary Clinton in 2016 and has his fiefdom in an industrial and working-class area of Pennsylvania. Now he said of the Republican Party's demands to stop immigration: “It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a secure border.”
The danger, according to those who disagree with this line, is that it plays into the hands of the extreme right. Former Socialist President François Hollande told Le Monde, referring to the new law: “President Macron and the government have not accepted the votes of the National Front [nombre anterior del Reagrupamiento Nacional], they adopted their ideas.” So if you follow this line of reasoning, the far right will be unstoppable. On the other hand.
“There is an intuitive argument that the far right defends restricting immigration and therefore, if central parties advance stricter immigration policies, far-right voters should return to the center,” explains Werner Krause, a political scientist at the University of Potsdam and co-author of the study Works Reside? The strategies of the majority parties and the success of the right-wing radical parties. But he adds: “We have tested it with a sample of a dozen countries since the 1970s and found that this is not the case.” What we are seeing is that even more voters tend to lean to the right. The problem is that promoting these ideas can legitimize them.”
Demographer Hervé Le Bras warns: “Does facing the fears of the French reassure them?” I think, on the contrary, it gives them even more reasons to be afraid.” Le Bras notes that in countries like France, In Germany or the United States, the vote for the populist right is usually higher where there are fewer immigrants. “Immigration,” he explains, “is a baggage word.” When we talk about immigration, we are often not talking about lived experiences, but about other things such as identity, insecurity or the feeling of lack of protection and loss of control.
“This concern is cultivated and formulated because when you talk about immigration, the discourse goes in a single direction,” says Professor Héran from the College of France, while displaying a series of data on a screen to deny the alleged immigration wave in your country. “When we talk about immigration,” he laments, “it is always said that we have to protect ourselves from it, and it is always perceived as a threat against which we must put up a protective shield,” is President Macron's expression. The successes of integrating and bringing populations closer together, which are a reality, are not acknowledged.”
“You always have to listen, but listening does not mean participating,” explained François Ruffin, rising supporter of the French radical left and MP for La Francia Insumisa, in an interview with El PAÍS some time ago. “I will never cover my ears. The question is political: What do we do with it?” He, who represents a working-class district in northern France similar to Fetterman's in Pennsylvania, is against Macron's law.
There is a fine line between listening to the demands of the far-right voter without accepting them and empathizing and responding to real fears without falling into simplistic answers. Ruffin knows. You know this, Macron, who for the first time since coming to power in 2017 faced a rebellion within his ranks: a quarter of his deputies abstained or voted against the law, and the health minister resigned. And the “moderate” leaders of the EU know it, the broad middle into which social democrats, liberals and Christian democrats fit.
The European Pact on Immigration and Asylum contains restrictive and other measures that respond in part to demographic decline and the economic need for foreign workers and taxpayers. The Italy of Giorgia Meloni – heir to neo-fascism, ally of Vox and advocate of the most repressive immigration policies – has opened the door to 452,000 workers by 2025 for sectors in difficulty. Macron defends that his agreement will facilitate the legalization of undocumented workers in sectors where there is a labor shortage. In any case, he has asked the Constitutional Council to examine whether there are articles that, as the president himself believes, violate the Basic Law.
“It is wrong that Europe is being flooded, that is wrong,” emphasizes Macronist MP Vignal. “But there is a Europe that refuses to open its borders to other people.” And we shouldn’t ignore it, says he, a former judoka and ex-socialist who is used to working with Le Pen voters to deal with his district. “The French expect firmness. At the same time, we are a humanistic people. Strength is not enough,” he says. “We will need workers, but I want them to respect the Republic and the laws. If they don’t respect her, there will be no gifts, let her go home.”
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