VSt is a little music that has been rising in recent weeks, among certain political leaders as well as in the media. The current migratory situation has become so unbearable that urgent measures should be taken, even if they violate international law.
This is the meaning of the bills tabled at the end of May by the Les Républicains (LR) party, the foundations of which clearly have their sources in the most identity-based discourses on the political spectrum. “What is at stake is the survival of our nation, its cohesion”as presented by the president of LR, Eric Ciotti, in The Sunday newspaper (JDD) of May 21.
Workers of foreign origin whether in a regular situation or not, refugees or asylum seekers, students, separated families wishing to reunite: all of them should, in their view, pay for a situation of economic, social and even societal, of which they are naturally designated as the first scapegoats.
Easy, simple, even simplistic argument
As summarized by one of its promoters, Bruno Retailleau, in the same issue of the Sunday weekly, “migratory chaos leads to insecurity, partition and political chaos”. Argument easy, simple, even simplistic, and should not suffer any dispute, especially since the first concerned cannot defend themselves with the same media weapons.
Even if successive studies contradict these received ideas, even if it has been demonstrated on many occasions that the French system was far from being a dead end in terms of integration (cf. “ Feelings about migration and sense of integration », Insee, March 30, 2023), the treatment of certain editorialists and the aggressiveness now free of all control on certain social networks permanently fuel this race for shallots in the catalog of anti-immigration proposals.
Reestablishment of the offense of “clandestine stay”, tightening of the conditions for access to social benefits, state medical aid and family reunification, detention of asylum seekers on the territory and processing of their applications only at the borders or in consulates: many of these measures proposed by Les Républicains are contrary to France’s commitments on human rights at European and international level. But that does not bother their authors, who even claim this regression as a means, according to Eric Ciotti, to make “jump the locks that contradict the popular will”.
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