How France’s far right changed the debate on immigration

Speaking on the island of Sein off Brittany’s coast, whose men famously took to their boats to join the rag-tag Free French forces in neighbouring Britain following General Charles de Gaulle’s call to resist Nazi occupation, French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday made his own appeal to the French people. Amid his usual calls to the public to reject the “extremes” of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement national, or RN) party and the left-wing New Popular Front, the pro-business president let slip a word he’d never said before – at least in public. The New Popular Front (NFP)’s programme, he stressed, was “totally immigrationist”.

“They’re proposing to abolish all the laws that allow us to control immigration,” he said.

Macron is no stranger to the word “immigrationist” – it’s been spat at him and other liberal or left-wing politicians many times over the years by figures from France’s far-right nativist movements, including then-National Front co-founder and convicted anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen. The word itself implies conspiracy: a supposed political plot to open France’s borders to an “invasion” of migrants bent on out-breeding France’s white Gallic majority. Now, it seems, Macron is launching those same accusations to his left.

The RN’s unprecedented success in this month’s European elections, which pushed Macron to call snap legislative elections at home on June 30 and July 7, has been a stark reminder of how central immigration has become to Europe’s political debates since the 2015 refugee crisis. Uprooted by worsening wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers sought new lives in Europe, their arrival causing chaos across the continent as governments scrambled to coordinate a response.

Read moreEU parliament adopts stricter migration rules in landmark asylum reform

Ariadna Ripoll Servent, professor for politics of the European Union at University of Salzburg’s Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies, said that the refugee crisis had allowed far-right responses to migration to find increasing support across the EU, including among mainstream parties such as former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Les Républicains.

“[One of the repercussions] has been a legitimation of their nativist views, which has often been used by mainstream political parties, especially in the centre-right of the political spectrum,” she said. “This was particularly visible among French MEPs from Les Républicains, who copied the same ideas and messages as Rassemblement National in the European Parliament. Many of the changes they proposed to [last year’s] EU Migration Pact were almost identical to those proposed by Rassemblement National and other nativist parties.”

 Marta Lorimer, lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, said that the far right’s resurgence in Europe had not happened overnight.

“The RN’s success in the EU elections shows both how able the party has been to win the loyalty of a strong core of voters – and win over new ones – and how normalised the far right has become,” she said. “We have already seen more and more far right parties form in the EU and become more successful. We have also seen mainstream parties copy their policies.”

Blood or soil

In 2022, immigrants made up just over 10 percent of France’s population, with a little over a third having already obtained French nationality. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said in November 2021 that between 600,000 and 700,000 undocumented migrants were living in France – potentially half as many, he stressed, as in the neighbouring UK.

Unsurprisingly for a party that has painted what it calls “uncontrolled immigration” as a relentless assault on French culture, identity and heritage since its co-founding by a former member of the Waffen-SS, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has had a great deal to say on the subject of foreigners in France over the years.

Although current RN president and prime ministerial candidate Jordan Bardella has yet to fully articulate his party’s policies, the RN’s policy objectives on immigration have remained largely unchanged since the days of Le Pen senior’s National Front. During the 2022 presidential elections, the party proposed big changes to France’s immigration system to fight against what the RN describes as a flood of migration that threatens to submerge the nation.

Perhaps the most drastic of these measures would be the abolition of France’s “droit de sol”, or ius soli, which automatically grants French nationality at 18 to people born on French soil to foreign parents (provided they have lived in France for at least five years since the age of 11). Instead, automatic French nationality would be restricted by blood, granted only to people born to at least one French parent. Without this change, the proposal reads, “no condition is put (on obtaining French nationality), no love of the homeland needs to be shown”.

“It is unacceptable to become French under these conditions,” it reads.

Just what the acceptable way to become French would look like remains open to interpretation. Under the proposed programme, these measures would go hand-in-hand with further restrictions on attaining French nationality, with the party describing “very strict conditions” for naturalisation based on guarantees of assimilation, mastery of the French language and respect for French laws and customs. This hard-won privilege would also be withdrawn in cases where naturalised French citizens commit acts “incompatible with French nationality or prejudicial to the nation’s interests”.

This fundamental change would be accompanied by what Bardella continues to call a “drastic” cut in immigration levels through measures such as withdrawing residency from migrants who haven’t worked in more than a year, ending family reunification visas, the systematic deportation of irregular migrants or migrants convicted of criminal acts and the total off-shoring of asylum applications. A thwarted amendment to Macron’s sprawling immigration law passed last year also put forward fixed migration quotas – soon struck down as unconstitutional.

Read moreFrench immigration law: What are the measures deemed unconstitutional?

Finally, these changes would be accompanied by the realisation of a long-held RN dream: a legal regime of “national preference” that would give French citizens priority access to housing and employment and restrict a range of welfare benefits to French nationals.

These wide-reaching reforms to France’s immigration programme would, following Le Pen’s presidential campaign, be put to a nation-wide referendum. As well as seemingly giving the RN a popular mandate for what would be a total break with France’s post-war consensus on immigration, this measure could also allow the party to potentially side-step challenges from the Constitutional Council, which has previously ruled that RN-proposed changes to French immigration law were unconstitutional.

Lorimer said that much of the RN’s programme built on broader fears that people migrating to France were failing to fit in with French society.

“In European debates on multiculturalism, there is frequently a distinction drawn between ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’,” she said. “To put it as simply as possible … with integration, migrants are ‘integrated’ in majority culture and may retain aspects of their native identity; with assimilation, they are expected to adopt the culture of the country they moved to. France has been frequently defined as a country that pursues ‘assimilation’.”

“This is a simplification of a more complex picture, but the RN draws on this idea to argue that new migrants to France should ‘assimilate’, leave behind the elements of their native identity and adopt the mores and values of France,” she explained. “Those who do not do so are presented as dangerous threats to French identity because they import foreign cultures into France and fail to integrate into the majority culture.”

Macron in the middle

With rising popular support for Le Pen pushing her into the second round of the past two presidential elections, Macron seems to have felt the ground shifting beneath his feet. The president’s Ensemble coalition has increasingly linked the question of immigration with public safety, speaking less and less of much-needed migrant workers and foreign students and more and more of irregular immigration as a threat to the Republic and its citizens. Macron’s full-throated commitment to laïcité, France’s strict separation of church and state, has been increasingly invoked in opposition to what the far right has for years trumpeted as the creeping Islamism rampant in France’s immigrant communities – many of whom come from France’s Muslim-majority former colonies in North and West Africa.

Although Macron’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal spends more words on cost-of-living issues than immigration, a look at the past seven years of Macron’s presidency shows a camp that has lurched – or let itself be led – sharply to the right on the subject. 

Macron’s calls for voters to support his candidacy as a barricade against the rise of the far right seemed to ring hollow after the president agreed to a series of stark amendments championed by the conservative Les Républicains and the RN in order to pass his landmark immigration bill late last year. Although the country’s highest constitutional authority struck down the additions, it was nevertheless a dizzying victory for the far right to see its long-cherished policy of national preference passed by the National Assembly.

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Camille Le Coz, associate director and senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute Europe, said that Macron’s two terms in office had seen a narrowing of the terms of public debate around immigration.

“I would say there’s really been an increasing focus on irregular migration. The immigration law that was passed late last year was initially presented as a project that was more balanced, with measures to control irregular migration, but also with measures encouraging labour migration,” she said.

“The debate took such a turn in the past year that it really became much more about fighting irregular migration, which is a much more narrow view of the issue.”

“We will continue to expel from our national territory any delinquent or radicalised foreigner who represents a threat to public order”, the Ensemble coalition’s 2024 programme said, adding that nearly 12,000 such people had been deported since 2017. “Any issuance of a long-term residence permit will be conditional on mastery of the French language and respect for republican values. Otherwise, prefects will be able to withdraw the residence permit.”

Macron also played a leading role in the negotiations around the EU’s long-awaited Pact on Migration and Asylum, voted through the European Parliament earlier this year after months of tense bargaining. The Pact, which denies asylum seekers the right to enter the EU while their claims are being processed, has not been without its critics.

“The new Pact strengthens the wishes of right-wing parties to see borders strengthened and to have more restrictive asylum policies,” Ripoll Servent said. “It also links more tightly asylum and other forms of migration, particularly irregular migration. There are some potential balancing elements, such as the crisis regulation and resettlement measures, but they are relatively weak – and might not get to be used by member states.”

With the legislative elections fast approaching, Le Coz said that Macron’s camp was likely to continue trying to thread the needle between addressing public concerns about France’s changing demography and upholding its long-cherished liberal credentials.

“I expect them to position themselves as the ‘reasonable centrists’,” she said. “Being tough on migration – the focus on return – but ready to abide by our international obligations, for example, against externalisation proposals, and for a European perspective, for example standing for the implementation of the Pact, which is really central in their positioning.”

Alongside this rhetoric of irregular immigration as a security threat to French citizens and a cultural threat to French values, the RN has stubbornly connected rising levels of migration with the economic hardships facing French nationals. Within its promise to put French nationals first for work and housing and strip migrants of social security benefits lies the once-unspoken conclusion that more voters seem to be drawing: more migrants means less to go around. But Lorimer said that the idea that migration was coming at the expense of French nationals was far from clear-cut. 

“The exact impact of migration on receiving societies is hard to assess,” Lorimer said. “Migrants typically contribute to the economy and frequently put in more than they take out. There may be more localised effects of migration in certain places, but it is not usually the places that have the highest number of migrants that oppose migration. In many cases, what citizens are blaming on the migrants is more the result of state under-investment in key sectors such as social housing.”

Popular discontent

It is just this belief that underlines the immigration policies put forth by the NFP left-wing coalition. Having campaigned heavily against Macron’s immigration law, the common programme announced by the hastily assembled grouping of left-wing and social-democratic parties in the chaotic wake of the European elections prominently promises to repeal the legislation.

In its place, the NFP is proposing a radical departure from the language of scarcity and insecurity that has dominated discussions around immigration these past few years. The group’s platform pledges guaranteed access to state medical aid for undocumented migrants as well as pathways to regularisation for irregular workers, students, and parents of children in school. 

If they win a majority in the elections, the group would also push to give people waiting for their asylum seeker claims to be processed the right to work legally, create a status for people displaced by the worsening climate crisis and introduce a ten-year residence permit. 

“[The New Popular Front] do have a number of measures on integration and inclusion that I think will resonate with the public,” Le Coz said. “Polls show that the public are not against welcoming people, they’re just anxious about the way it’s being done.”

With almost half of French voters in the EU elections saying that immigration was the main issue determining how they cast their ballot, though, it’s easy to see why Macron is accusing left-wing parties who want to make it easier rather than harder for migrants to settle in France of being out-of-touch with the public. 

“As for the NFP, I’d say … it’s about standing for common values, including the core republican principles,” Le Coz said. “So yes, they will be attacked on this, especially LFI (left-wing France Unbowed party), but that’s what’s coming out from the union they’ve forged.”

Whether the NFP can successfully disentangle the issues of migration, public safety and economic hardship in the minds of voters is far from clear. Ripoll Servent said that years of letting the far right lead the discussion on immigration in Europe had made left and liberal parties alike in danger of losing far more than the argument.

“Migration has also been characterised by NIMBY logic – ‘not in my backyard’,” she said. “So, it is very difficult to win elections with positive messages on migration and it is very easy to lose elections if the topic is left to nativist populist parties.”