Are a third of the occupants of social housing immigrants, as assured by Jordan Bardella?

To control immigration, Marine Le Pen wants to enshrine a national preference in the Constitution, so that French citizens are guaranteed priority for access to employment or housing. And to demonstrate that this is not always the case, Jordan Bardella took the example of social housing this Thursday, January 13. “We can deplore that 31% of those who today, according to INSEE, occupy social housing are immigrants”, then affirmed the acting president of the RN on the set of Cnews. An abnormal situation, according to him: “Social housing is social assistance and it is quite normal that it goes in priority to those who contribute and who pay it. But is it true for all that?

Since Jordan Bardella cites figures from INSEE, let’s try to find them among the many studies produced by the institute. The last comprehensive housing survey dates back more than ten years. Published in 2017, this study on “housing conditions in France” of more than 200 pages is based on figures collected in 2013. The limit here lies in the fact that what was true at the time may not be so today.

But let’s still look at what immigrants accounted for in the share of social housing tenants that year. “In 2013, according to the Housing survey, 2.7 million immigrant households and 25.3 million non-immigrant households live in metropolitan France”, can we read on page 75. And of these 2.7 million immigrant households, 34% were tenants in the social sector… Or 918,000 households, according to calculations by INSEE, contacted about this.

Then, to identify the proportion of immigrant occupants in the social rental sector, it is necessary to have the total number of households renting this type of housing. On page 26 of this same report, INSEE gives the details: “In 2013, out of 28 million main metropolitan residences, 11.1 million were occupied by tenants: 4.6 million in social housing, 6.5 million in the free sector, 16.2 million by owners and 0, 7 million by households housed for free”. In total, 4.6 million households were therefore tenants in social housing, of which 918,000 were immigrant households. This corresponds to 19.9% ​​of the occupants of social housing at the time, and not 31% as currently advanced by Jordan Bardella.

But then what was the elected official referring to when he mentioned that a third of the occupants of social housing were immigrants? To this, INSEE is able to provide an explanation: “This figure covers so-called foreign people, that is to say those living in France who are not of French nationality. A person is an immigrant if they live in France and were born abroad of foreign nationality. A household immigrant is defined as a household whose reference person is an immigrant. This means that an immigrant may have acquired French nationality and still qualify as such, unlike a foreign person. Jordan Bardella therefore confuses foreign people with immigrants and inflates the real share of immigrant occupants of social housing – a data which however finds its own limits in its age.

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