2023-08-02 19:25:56
Accused by the right of being too lax and by the left of being too hard on the subject, the President of the Republic spoke about his immigration policy in an interview granted to the Figaro Magazine during his trip to New Caledonia at the end of July.
The opportunity to return to the riots that shook France last month. Some right-wing and far-right politicians have drawn a parallel between the violence that has engulfed several towns in the suburbs of Paris and the provinces and immigration, forcing Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin to react. The latter had explained in a formula, very relayed, that there were in the police stations “especially Mathéo and Kevin”, to rule out “the only identity explanation” of the troubles.
Without repeating the formula of his minister, Emmanuel Macron calls in the Figaro Magazine to “not confuse immigration and integration”, even if he considers that “we very clearly have a problem of integration” in France.
“These riots are not a subject of current immigration, he specifies. It is a broader subject of the difficulties of certain cities, of socio-economic difficulties, of integration difficulties in certain cases and of the functioning of democracy in the age of social networks. »
While his Minister of the Interior had profiled the rioters, saying he was studying the statistics, the President of the Republic calmed things down. “When you look at things lucidly, 90% of those arrested are French. Afterwards, we have no ethnic statistics in our country. There are French people with an immigrant background, others who don’t have an immigrant background. »
The fear of societies living “back to back”
The Head of State gave some clues about his immigration policy at the start of the school year, without delivering any sensational exclusivity. “We have always been a country of immigration and we will continue to be,” he said.
He dismantled the ideas of the extreme right in this area. “Any reform that takes us out of Europe is ineffective, because the problem is European and because we are not an island,” he believes.
Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, praised the implementation of a “settlement policy” because he fears the emergence in France of societies living “back to back”. “A lot of people say No, we don’t want to see new arrivals here. Personally, I think that we integrate all the better if we do it in a diffuse way. If you put all the Ukrainian families arriving in the same places, you don’t integrate them,” he explains.
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