Immigration expert -ID debate harmful
National identity debate is being used by politicians to fuel racism and prejudice, says leading academic
THE NATIONWIDE debate on what it means to be French is being used by politicians to fuel racism and prejudice, a former advisor to the government has warned.
Historian Gérard Noiriel was one of eight leading academics who resigned from the board of the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in 2007, angered by the creation by Nicolas Sarkozy of a Ministry for Immigration and National Identity.
Mr Noiriel said the latest debate on French identity, which was launched by the government in November, serves no purpose and plays on some of the public’s prejudices. Every time we debate national identity it is done to stigmatise foreigners. It is a way of positioning ‘us’ against ‘them’,” he said.
“There’s a very repetitive side to the debate. It fuels racism and prejudice and encourages the French to have a closed mentality.”
Mr Noiriel has described France as “the USA of Europe” because of its long history of immigration. Research in 2005 found that a quarter of children here have at least one foreign grandparent.
Immigration has been at the centre of the political debate since the 19th Century,” he said. “After every period of prosperity we have a crisis, when the unemployed accuse immigrants of taking their jobs. It’s completely cyclical.”
According to research from population studies group Ined and national statistics body Insee, the immigrant population in France has been relatively stable for the past three decades, consistently between 7.5% and 8%.
What has changed is where these new arrivals come from. In the late 1880s it was neighbouring countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, then North Africa during the post-war boom of the Trente Glorieuses.
Today it is former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia.
Since the Immigration Ministry was set up two years ago, new arrivals from outside the EU have been required to sign a contrat d’accueil et d’intégration, which tests knowledge of the French language and civic life.
“If we had forced this on people at other times then millions of immigrants would not have come here,” Mr Noiriel said. “This language criteria penalises people. It limits the possibilities.”
