Immigration: in 1989, Mitterrand already estimated that France had reached its “threshold of tolerance”

In the 1980s, the migration issue was already causing controversy among French politicians. During debates or television interviews, the subject was regularly discussed. Of course, the interventions varied according to the political family of origin. The right called for tougher reception conditions, while the left pleaded for the extension of the rights of immigrants. But some of the positions taken at the time could surprise more than one today.

“There are immigrants (…) who don't want to become French, and who want to remain attached to their country of origin. (...) And then there are those who are there with their work contract and residence permit. Are there too many? (...) The Mauroy government has taken steps to facilitate their reintegration into their country of origin, giving them certain advantages so that they can leave on their own. That is to say, that the number must be reduced”.

While Nupes castigates the Borne government's bill, it seems difficult to imagine that these words were spoken by the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic. And yet, these are indeed comments made by François Mitterrand during the debate between the two rounds of the 1988 presidential election.

A year and a half later, a similar sequence repeats itself. Asked about the migration issue, he says that “the tolerance threshold [of the number of immigrants present in France] was reached in the 1970s”. A phraseology that today seems to make his heirs uncomfortable.

“Without going so far as to say that I am shocked, I absolutely do not share this vision”, formulates with hesitation the ecologist deputy Sandrine Rousseau who reaffirms that she is in favor of welcoming immigrants, whatever their status.

More nuanced on the question, the PS deputy from Essonne Jérôme Guedj “does not take this sentence at face value” which, according to him, implies “a dimension of quantification which would mean that there is a sort of ceiling fixed by the public authorities".

“It doesn’t make sense to say there was too much. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing said at the time that the tolerance threshold for the number of unemployed had been reached. And yet, we have since gone from 300,000 unemployed to more than 3 million,” adds Sandrine Rousseau. Anxious, however, not to degrade the memory of the reunifier of the left, the ecofeminist wants to believe in “elements of political language”.

However, the media sequences that are still running today on social networks have been preceded by concrete actions that have contributed to reducing the number of immigrant arrivals. Over the period 1982-1990, the share of immigrants in the French population even decreased from 7.4 to 7.3%. However, for those who remember the presidential campaign of 1981, and the first months of François Mitterrand at the Élysée, these figures may surprise.

And for good reason, after his election in 1981, the migration policy was greatly relaxed. The State regularizes more than 130,000 undocumented people. But the economic shift of 1983 changed the situation, and signaled the return to austerity. Unemployment rose from 5.5 to 7.3% between 1980 and 1983. For the government, it now became increasingly complicated to justify new influxes of immigrants.

“What I know is that in the years preceding 81, there was a tremendous desire to bring immigrants to our country, no doubt because they were paid less than others, less well than workers. the French”, asserted François Mitterrand to Jacques Chirac during the 1988 debate. to seek immigrants by charter, and by whole trucks” and “to [have] dumped them in France in our large factories, particularly in the Paris region”.

A speech which is reminiscent of that of Jean Jaurès, who denounced at the beginning of the 20th century the “international capitalism” which went “to seek its labor on the markets where it is most debased (…), to throw it (…) on the French market and to bring wages everywhere in the world to the level of the countries where they are the lowest”. Of which act.

From 1983, identity checks and controls were reinforced. The following year, a policy of incentive to voluntary departures, inspired by the “Stoléru million”, was introduced by the Mauroy government under the name of “reintegration assistance”.

“Realistic turn”, “turnaround”, or even “turning”. The former adviser to François Mitterrand, Jacques Attali refutes each of these terms. “François Mitterrand's attitude on immigration has always been the same. She was both very ambitious and very reasonable. Ambitious insofar as he thought that it was necessary to give all the rights to foreigners”. Reasonable, perhaps because, like his Prime Minister Michel Rocard (1988-1989), François Mitterrand was aware that France was not in a position to accommodate “all the misery in the world”.

But above all, Jacques Attali insists on what he describes as "Mitterrand's obsession": integration. "He talked about it all the time: integration through work, through school, through the right to vote as well, for municipal elections." And to deplore that the Nupes today does not attach the same importance to it. "There is a failure of the state in the integration of neighborhood populations, and the left no longer makes it its spearhead".

A vision to which Sandrine Rousseau does not subscribe. "I don't think we can say, having more than one in four French people with a foreign grandparent, that there has been a failure of the integration policy." For her, the problem is rather a lack of investment in working-class neighborhoods.

But the socialist Jérôme Guedj says he is convinced that “the debates would be a thousand times less virulent if we had had twenty years of integration policy behind us”. Especially since it is, according to him, “more a question of an integration problem than of immigration as such”. And to add: “The issues of the time are not totally different. We must put more effort into the policy of integrating immigrant populations”.