Endless discussions about the number of migrants to be admitted occupy the media in all countries: some say that more are needed to fill jobs that are vacant due to a lack of skills or the refusal of nationals to take on these tasks. Others counter that what they call “an unbearable invasion” that would destroy the identity of the host country must be stopped as a matter of urgency.
President Trump repeats every day that he is going to expel millions of illegal immigrants, even children, even if they have been in the country for ten years, even if they work very hard, even if they are perfectly integrated, to the applause of his supporters, the criticism of NGOs and the reluctance of employers who fear the disappearance of a cheap and indentured workforce. In France, the Prime Minister, the right and the extreme right speak of “migratory submersion”, while the left is scandalized by a vocabulary it denounces as fascist, and proclaims that we can admit more foreigners without any problem.
In fact, migration is accelerating all over the world, with the acceleration of involuntary nomadism from the countryside to the cities, and then from the cities to more welcoming countries. In countless countries, both in the North and South (where most migrants still reside), foreigners are frowned upon, then expelled, only to be begged to return and legalized en masse.
In France, as elsewhere, we are largely mistaken about the nature of the problem: it’s not the number of people we take in, but the efforts we make to integrate them and the resources we devote to making this possible.
Thinking in terms of numbers (in France today, there are around 450,000 more migrants a year, including students passing through and political asylum seekers) and denouncing them as a threat to national identity, means taking it for granted that these foreigners cannot be integrated, and that receiving them means condemning ourselves to housing unassimilable foreign communities.
In fact, this is what is threatening to happen in many countries hit by waves of immigration, particularly Belgium, Great Britain and Canada. And above all in countless emerging countries (except when these immigrants speak the same language and/or practice the same religion as the inhabitants of the host country, as is the case in Europe with migrants from Eastern Europe, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Colombia and many other countries).
In most other countries, the entire political class seems to take it for granted that migrants will remain what they are, foreigners irreducibly incapable of sharing the values of the host country, whose values they will make no effort to share, and that their numbers must therefore be limited so as not to unbalance the national identity.
This theoretically inaccurate thesis is made plausible by the absence of an integration policy.
When one country, like France, devotes scandalously few resources to training foreigners to learn French as a foreign language (FLE), leaving the task to admirable associations with no resources; when this same country forbids illegal foreigners to work legally, thus pushing them into clandestine activities, within their communities of origin, whether they come from the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa or China ; when another country, such as Belgium or Great Britain, makes no effort to require migrants to respect national values, speak the national language(s), learn the national culture and values; when, in these countries, family reunification allows husbands or wives who don’t speak the language of the host country to arrive legally; when we let them assert loud and clear that the laws of their country of origin, or that of their religion, take precedence over those of the host country, we can only have ghettos, closed communities, some of which become proselytizing and threaten national identity.
The problem of immigration is therefore not one of numbers, but of the resources devoted to, and constraints imposed on, integration.
In France, which has benefited so much from the contribution of migrants over the past 70 years, we must provide newcomers with every means to learn the national language and culture; we must authorize those who make these efforts to work legally in the host country a few months after their arrival on national soil. We must affirm that no one can live in France if they do not consider the law of the Republic to be superior, in the areas that concern them, to those of any religion, or to those of their country of origin, and if they do not do what is necessary to ensure that their children learn the values of the Republic, in the schools of the Republic. In particular, we must demand that foreigners and French citizens alike respect a number of sacred principles: secularism, gender equality, national unity, the use of the French language, and the primacy of the law of the Republic (and of the European Union) over any other law, principle or practice. Everything must be done to avoid community confinement and inbreeding.
Those who do not accept these rules, who refuse to benefit from the means of integration (provided they exist) and who would like to transform the host country into a place of conquest for their language, religion and way of life, must be courteously deported.
Those who accept this contract, and put it into practice, are more than welcome. They are even sought after, because the nation will be enriched by their skills, their energies, their cuisine, their music, their arts, their literature, their creativity, and all that their suffering will have taught them about the demands of life in society and the privileges of democracy.
In return, the nation must provide them with every means of integration. We’re a long way from that.
Picture:Members of the Olympic Refugee Team at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris. IOC/David Burnett