Lhe European elections of June 9 show a strong overall increase in the vote for right-wing populist parties. Immigration held a central place during the campaign, and more particularly in the countries (France, Netherlands, Austria and Italy) where the far right emerged strengthened. This correlation reflects the ability of the far right to capitalize on the fears, expressed by many voters, of economic downgrading and cultural dispossession in the face of the shocks of globalization – immigration, commercial competition, robotization.
How can we envisage the future of the European Union (EU) in terms of immigration in a context of rising populism and economic decline? The scenario that is emerging for the EU is that of a vicious circle where immigration, voting for the far right and economic decline mutually reinforce each other. To understand how this vicious circle works, we must first analyze its components: the link between immigration and populist voting, between populism and economic performance and, finally, between the extreme right and the qualification structure of immigration.
It is blindness not to see that, in a dominant way, more immigration, particularly unskilled, has translated in Europe over the last two decades into more votes in favor of the extreme RIGHT. This does not exclude the possibility of positive local dynamics, called “contact”, but these are the exception rather than the rule. In a recent article on the link between populist voting and globalizationwe showed that low-skilled immigration, just like imports of goods with a high content of low-skilled labor, result in a surge in voting in favor of right-wing populist parties and in progress of populist ideas such as as reflected in the professions of faith of traditional parties.
However, our study also shows that “skilled globalization”, whether immigration or imports of goods with a high content of skilled labor, results, on the contrary, in a significant drop in vote in favor of the extreme right. The fundamental lesson to be learned from this study is therefore that there is no inevitability in the relationship between openness to globalization and the rise of extremes and that the qualification content of globalization, whether immigration or trade, largely conditions its effect on votes.
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