“La Nupes must break the link established between insecurity and immigration and reconnect with the logic of emancipation”

2023-07-11 10:00:12

For several weeks, the working-class neighborhoods have been crossed by a legitimate wind of revolt, after a policeman shot dead the young Nahel M., in Nanterre, following a refusal to comply. Right and extreme right try to explain this tragedy by an overly lax migration policy, while on the contrary it finds its source in systemic racism.

It is in this context that a bill on the question of immigration will soon arrive in the National Assembly and that the subject will once again be at the center of public debate.

Referendum, restriction of the right to asylum and family reunification, primacy of national law over European law… After the terrible tragedy in Annecy, where a Syrian refugee from Sweden attacked children with knives, the nationalist escalation and xenophobic rights now seems limitless, with a new participant in the person of former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.

But as regularly now since the subject comes back on the table, the left wonders what attitude it should adopt and, in particular, if it should not show more firmness. Under the five-year term of François Hollande, Manuel Valls then Bernard Cazeneuve in fact forged before their time a doctrine of “and at the same time”, declining in migratory matters by the slogan “Humanity and firmness”.

Humanity therefore, so that the solidarity that the left has always promoted comes up against the question of otherness as little as possible. Firmness, to respond to the angelism trial that is regularly brought against it in the field of security. However, this is where the shoe pinches. The formula turns out, in the field of immigration, to be totally hollow and ineffective.

Terrible slip

First, because foreigners are neither better nor worse than nationals. They are human beings who have left, in a chosen way or not (the truth is most often between the two), the place where they were born to go and live elsewhere. There is therefore no need to be more generous with them, because they are no less capable than the others.

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Nor to be harder, because they are not more dangerous. The Center for Prospective Studies and International Information, attached to the services of the Prime Minister, publishes, in its letter of April 2023, the conclusions of a series of studies which are unanimous: there is no link of cause and effect between immigration and delinquency. This is why the words of Bruno Retailleau [président du groupe Les Républicains au Sénat], who recently tried to explain the phenomena of urban violence by the real or supposed origin of their participants, are as misleading as they are nauseating.

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