Immigration is vital for Europe’s old nations: this is the well-known refrain of the Left. In France, it has just been reiterated in a report by the progressive think tank Terra Nova, which recommends welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants every year to ensure the “sustainability of the French social model.” The Observatory of Immigration and Demography (OID) responded by vigorously defending the exact opposite conclusion, backed by statistics. The battle is not only ideological; it is also economic.
A voluminous report by Terra Nova, which is known for its decidedly left-wing positions and as a source of inspiration for the French Socialist Party, was published on Monday, May 12th, to defend, once again, the massive influx of immigrants into France. The usual argument is that immigrants are needed to “support the pension system,” which operates in France on a pay-as-you-go basis. This time, the angle taken is broader: immigration is said to be the sine qua non for the survival of the famous ‘French social model’—which everyone agrees is seriously suffering today and no longer convinces many people, either in terms of its effectiveness or its medium- or long-term viability.
According to Terra Nova’s models, between 250,000 and 310,000 immigrant workers must be welcomed each year until 2040-2050 to maintain a sufficient ratio between the working and non-working populations. In 2022, France welcomed 331,000 (legal) immigrants—equivalent to the population of a city like Nantes. However, the overall sentiment in French public opinion is that this level of immigration must be reduced.
“Without immigrant workers, our economy is faltering,” insist the authors of the report, highlighting the need for workers in “high-demand professions” (such as home care and construction) as well as other areas, such as health care (one in five doctors in France today is of foreign origin).
In line with the think tank’s values, Terra Nova’s discourse is ideological rather than economic. To encourage the mass immigration that the French find repugnant, work must be done on raising the ‘acceptability’ of immigration. According to the report’s authors, it will certainly require a strong state propaganda campaign highlighting the benefits of the vivre-ensemble and multiculturalism, to counterbalance the deep-seated feeling among the French that their country no longer belongs to them. The French tend to overestimate the proportion of foreigners in the population, the report suggests, and derive “disproportionate anxiety” from this “misunderstanding.”
Making the native population feel guilty is a discipline that the Left knows well, preferring to talk about a “feeling of insecurity” rather than rampant crime.
Faced with this umpteenth product of pro-immigration propaganda, the Observatory of Immigration and Demography, which aims to inform the debate on immigration with rigorous, data-driven studies, has published a rebuttal designed to dispel the myth that immigration is the only solution and the only future for European societies.
“You don’t change a recipe that fails,” exclaimed its director, Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, ironically in an op-ed published in Le Figaro in response to Terra Nova.
The Observatory dismantles the progressive think tank’s argument by first attacking its methodological biases. The Terra Nova report assumes that the employment rate of the immigrant population is the same as that of the French population. However, this is absolutely not the case. “The employment rate of foreigners from outside the European Union—those affected by the immigration policy that the study aims to guide—is almost 10 points lower in France than that of French nationals,” Pouvreau-Monti points out in his article, adding that this is one of the lowest rates among all EU countries. Barely half of non-European foreigners currently living in France are actually in employment. And out of ten residence permits granted in France today, only one is for economic reasons. In these circumstances—which are real, not imagined—how can anyone honestly argue that immigration is the engine of employment?
Furthermore, Terra Nova deliberately ignores all the additional population flows caused by labour immigration, which is currently permitted in France by a very broad family reunification policy.
Terra Nova also fails to mention any of the costs generated by immigration, which weigh heavily on the famous ‘social model.’ Poverty, unemployment, poor overall health: immigrants receive, on average, twice as much in social benefits per year as French citizens.
As for the famous myth of pensions financed by immigration, the Left’s reasoning conveniently overlooks the fact that immigrants also grow old … and that their pensions will also have to be financed one day. They are not ‘net contributors’ to French pensions, whose presence would have no impact on the generalised ‘Ponzi scheme’ that is the pay-as-you-go pension system in its current form, according to analyses by Dutch researcher Jan Van de Beek, cited by Pouvreau-Monti.
Finally, it is important to consider—something that Terra Nova will never, ever do—that there are also other effects of immigration, which are apparently unquantifiable but ultimately have an economic impact. The massive arrival of populations who do not share the French way of life or values creates tensions, not to say accelerated deterioration of the living environment and housing—issues the State is then forced to address. The appeal of Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s most immigrant-rich administrative district (or department), highlighted by Terra Nova, depends on billions in public funds aimed at offering modest benefits to those who have the courage to settle in a devastated area.
The work carried out by the Observatory is commendable. On the conservative side, one of the most urgent tasks is indeed to dismantle the myth, so deeply rooted and so well maintained by the Left, that immigration is the only, indispensable and non-negotiable solution for the future of Western countries. This assumption, presented as rational when it is nothing more than the result of ideological bias, is not supported by analysis of the facts or by the figures. If not challenged, it will continue to sterilise political thought, effectively preventing the emergence of any alternative solutions.