Lhe problem with the eternal debate on “immigration”, back in France with the examination of a bill in Parliament, is that the gap between complex realities and the elements of language used in the public debate to evoke them continues to grow, at the risk of confusion and manipulation.
“In France, the integration of Muslims is a failure. » This refrain sounds today like a statement of evidence. The urban riots of 2005, the attacks of 2012 and 2015 would have confirmed the obsolescence of the “French melting pot”, whose convulsions but also the remarkable and old efficiency had been described and analyzed at the end of the 1980s by the historian Gérard Noiriel.
“Integration”, this word commonly used to designate the more or less serene incorporation of immigrants and their children into the national community, long brandished as a political objective, is no longer in vogue: considered as a discriminatory injunction by descendants of immigrants, the term is now found above all in the mouths or in the writing of those who, by presenting integration as a definitively dead promise, mean that they reject it in the name of the preservation of a national identity supposedly immutable.
The slogan of “integration” is so confused that it is Gérald Darmanin, minister of the police, who uses it to “sell” a provision supposed to “balance” the repressive nature of his bill, a defensible article, but derisory in view of the stakes: the requirement to pass a French exam for the issue of a residence permit.
If the idea – if not the word – of “integration” has almost disappeared from the media and political radar, it is perhaps because this process is partially underway and that “trains that arrive on time” (otherwise says what works) are of no interest to journalists or elected officials. In these times of whirlwind identity where a columnist can assert on the CNews channel that Muslims “don’t give a damn about the Republic” et “don’t even know what the word means”you have to (re)read the captivating monograph by Stéphane Beaud entitled The France of the Belhoumi. Family portraits (La Découverte 2018, republished 2020).
“Silent Process”
For five years, the sociologist followed a family of eight children born to Algerian immigrant parents and who grew up in France between 1977 and 2017, whose itineraries he traces. His story, worthy of a television series, does not pour into rose water: it is about prison, drugs, school failure, heartbreaks over Islam and conflicts of historical and class loyalty. , but also family solidarity and the support of educational and social institutions.
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