Opinion column by Muriel Pénicaud Published in La Croix on 03/10/2023
Otherness is an asset. The history of our country demonstrates this. Nearly a third of the French population has at least one immigrant parent or grandparent. Over several centuries, we are all concerned. The foreigner is not the other, it's you, me, all of us. Marseilles was founded by the Phocaeans and has grown through the contribution of many Mediterranean populations.
Diversity has always nourished and stimulated our country, in economic life as well as in science and art. To stigmatize difference is to deny history and life. What would a musician play on a piano with no black keys, reduced only to white keys? "Victor Hugo wrote: "Nothing is solitary, everything is united.
Some are stirring up the perception of a threat of "invasion". Fear-mongering is always easier than embracing the complexity of reality. The quantitative question of immigration flows arises above all when it is coupled with geographical concentration. It reinforces the challenge and necessity of integration.
The number of refugees and displaced persons worldwide is rising sharply - 110 million in the last year. 80% of African immigration is between African countries, not to Europe. The financial flows sent by migrants to poor countries are greater than development aid or foreign investment, growing to 660 billion euros, of which only 8% goes to Africa. Immigration is one of the major drivers of globalization.
In Europe, immigration in the broadest sense of the term made the industrial revolution possible. For 150 years in France, Bretons, Provençals and Alsatians, then Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards, have come to work in the mines, steel industry, construction and automotive industries. Today, Africans and Europeans from Eastern Europe and the Balkans are indispensable in the "essential trades" of the service sector.
While immigrants account for 10.3% of the French population, they make up 38% of domestic workers, 25% of security guards, 17% of hotel and catering workers and 17% of hospital doctors. One of the challenges of integration is that almost half of them live in the Île-de-France region, where they account for 60% of homecare workers. The increase is real (+36% in France in twenty years), but far less than in Germany, the Nordic countries or Southern Europe. The 7 million migrants pay contributions and taxes, while their country has paid for their education. They are contributors to solidarity.
Can this trend be reversed? No, due to a double demographic effect. Northern countries (Europe, North America, Russia, China and Japan) are experiencing a sharp decline in population, with a falling birth rate and longer life expectancy. This is generating a growing need for care and personal assistance jobs, and a shortage of young people entering the job market. Yet the South is young - one in two Africans is under 20 - and the economic and educational challenges are immense. Labour shortage on the one hand, demographic pressure on the other: migration is set to increase. The question is not "can we stop it?" but "how to make it an opportunity for migrants and host countries alike". The Brexit fiasco demonstrates this a contrario.
The dialogue between Europe and the Mediterranean and African countries is sometimes rough, but crucial. Financial interests, the evolution of development aid, cultural and religious differences and deep-rooted resentment towards colonization that has not been adequately redressed are all intertwined. France can neither resolve these issues alone, nor open its borders without limits. But for those we welcome, there is a considerable integration effort to be made, different from assimilation or communitarianism.
Is integration generating an air draught? The excised woman or the hunted homosexual, the youngest son leaving his family with too many mouths to feed, the threatened journalist, the climate refugee, the victim of war in Ukraine or Sudan have no choice: it's their courage that gets them across the Mediterranean or the Alps, at the price of multiple dangers. Will mistreating them dissuade them from doing so? No, it will only add misery to greater misery.
Today, not only are we not integrating enough, but we're breaking up integration successes in progress, in the inhuman and absurd belief that this will discourage others. What a human, social and economic waste! The levers of successful integration are well known: they are school and work, supported by housing, sport, culture, language training, and psychological help for victims of extreme violence.
Let's start with the easy part:
Let's set up professional visas for jobs in short supply. So many SMEs are saved by hiring migrants, and friendships are often forged;
- Let's allow asylum seekers to work after one month's presence instead of six: they want to contribute, not be assisted;
- Let's recognize foreign diplomas with, if necessary, training bridges: why force doctors to become deliverymen?
- Let's encourage unaccompanied minors who are apprentices or vocational high-school students to obtain a diploma: on their 18th birthday, they lose their status and have to abandon their training. France is throwing these hopeful young people into the margins, many of them becoming homeless;
- Let's put an end to Kafkaesque incoherence: many foreign workers are in compliance with employment law and yet lose their residence permits.
In Marseille, the Pope called on us to overcome fear and indifference. There is only one dignified and pragmatic way forward: a humanism of responsibility, cooperation and openness. At the level of men and women. To welcome others without fear, we must first know who we are. We are called upon to engage in an essential democratic debate: what kind of people, what kind of humanity, do we want to be?
