“The left, by pretending that immigration is a false problem, condemns itself to watching formidable battles as a spectator”

2024-01-28 04:30:18

“There is no more serious problem than that of foreign labor”wrote Jean Jaurès on the front page of Humanity from June 28, 1914, a month before being assassinated. Referring today to the sentence of the great workers’ leader on the eve of the First World War, in a distant political context, may seem anachronistic. However, this sentence resonates as a call to order at a time when the left’s silence on immigration reflects its break with the working classes captured by the far right. Especially since the orientations of the leader of the left at the time sound surprisingly current: “ensure freedom and solidarity to the proletariat of all countries”, “provide for the needs of national production which often needs (…) an additional number of foreign workers » et “prevent employers” to use these to “to oust French workers from work and degrade their wages”.

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Jaurès’ reminder of a “left-wing” vision of immigration control, reconciling internationalism and the defense of the proletarians, is not useless after the decision of the Constitutional Council which tore the immigration law into pieces. If this partial censorship firstly reflects the cynicism of an executive leaving judges with the “dirty work” of canceling provisions whose unconstitutionality he himself highlighted, if this pandering is holy bread for the far right , for his denunciation of “government of judges against the people” and the Constitution “which prevents immigration from being controlled”the episode also marks a scathing defeat for the left, whose inability to influence the debates is patent.

Neither the trompe-l’oeil decision of the nine judges of Rue de Montpensier, which invalidates measures denounced on the left, nor the modest demonstrations against a “racist law” cannot hide the sidelining of progressives on a subject – immigration – where they have long given the “la”. By tabling a motion to reject, voting on it with the far right, on December 11, 2023, and exulting after its adoption, while it opened a boulevard to the xenophobic right, most of the left-wing deputies above all demonstrated the cowardly relief at having avoided a debate on which they themselves are divided and have lost their footing.

“Integration” policies caught in the vice

It is time, however, to accept the observation made more than a century ago by Jaurès on the economic and social issues – and not just moral, cultural or identity issues – of immigration. Since the end of the 19th century, all movements inherited from Marxism and claiming to be of the working class have navigated between the idea of ​​international solidarity, carried by the ideal of a world without borders and therefore open to migration, and protection French workers against“reserve army” of capital, in other words the foreigners introduced by the bosses to drive down wages, divide and weaken the proletariat.

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