It is the popular expression of the right to the extreme right. There would be “a submergence of migrants” in Lampedusa, symbol of the migration crisis in Europe. The significant influx of migrants between September 11 and 13 would be irrefutable proof of this: 8,500 people arrived in Lampedusa, more than the entire population of the small Italian island, located 150 km from the Tunisian coast. A gigantic proportion. And misleading reasoning.
“There is a form of submersion in the literal sense of the term, it is a qualifier that we must be able to use taking into account the proportions,” said again on September 19 on France Inter Bruno Retailleau, senator LR. When Éric Ciotti, president of the party, took up the situation the same day on RTL to underline that France had “issued more than 500,000 residence permits in 2022, if we add asylum requests” (which is not entirely the case, see further down in the article) and that it was “a form of migratory submergence”.
On the National Rally side, Jordan Bardella denounced on Europe 1/CNews the asylum and migration pact, adopted in the European Parliament, “a pact of submersion”. At Reconquest, we push further into the aquatic lexical field: “One continent spills onto the other” for Éric Zemmour, it’s “an invasion”. The head of the party’s list for the European elections, Marion Maréchal, went there to “carry the voice of millions of French people who refuse this migratory submersion”.
A “relative disorganization” of rescues
The idea, we understand, is that Lampedusa, France, Europe would be overwhelmed by immigration. However, this is not what the data and studies carried out by migration researchers show. “The truth is not an opinion,” emphasizes 20 minutes the geographer, specialist in migrations in the Mediterranean, Camille Schmoll.
A succession of reasons can explain these “concentrated” arrivals, notes the research director at EHESS: favorable weather conditions at the start, with calm weather, a situation of instability and insecurity which is intensifying in Tunisia, and above all the desire to prevent a certain number of maritime activities. Indeed, rescues at sea by NGOs and a slowdown in the activity of the Italian coast guard have led to “a relative disorganization” of rescues and the distribution of people rescued in Mediterranean ports.
“A panicking effect of concentration”
“All this means that people arrive spontaneously in Lampedusa, whereas when they are rescued at sea, they are theoretically accompanied to the nearest port, indicated by the government and, therefore, it is more orderly”, explains Camille Schmoll, remembering that in the past, periods with numerous arrivals have already taken place, but were less concentrated over a few days in Lampedusa.
“There, there is an effect of hyperconcentration”, she notes, but not of “submersion”. In 2011, when the Tunisian and Libyan dictatorships fell, around 60,000 people arrived in a few months. Cris Beauchemin, research director at the National Institute of Demographic Studies, specialist in statistical surveys on international migrants, also sees “a panicking effect of concentration”, “the result of policies which have consisted of blocking arrival in other places by holding back sea rescue boats.”
Four million Ukrainian refugees in 2022
For Camille Schmoll, these concentrated arrivals show that the hotspots set up by the European Union to immobilize, identify and sort migrants do not work. The Lampedusa hotspot has a capacity of 399 people. “In situations where there is a particularly large influx, we can see that it doesn’t work,” she continues. On the other hand, it creates a feeling of urgency, of invasion, a feeling of overwhelm, because it reinforces the visibility of the phenomenon. » And to emphasize that we are talking about a few thousand people when 4 million Ukrainian refugees benefited from protection in the EU in 2022 “without this causing any particular political agitation”.
Among the 447.2 million inhabitants of the EU on January 1, 2021, 23.7 million were not citizens of one of the EU Member States, or 5.3% of the Union’s population , according to Eurostat. Some 13.7 million people lived in a Member State other than the one in which they were born, mainly of Polish, Romanian, Italian and Portuguese nationality.
The myth of migratory submergence
A truly significant arrival of migrants is therefore used to support the myth of migratory overwhelm. “When we have declarations about invasion, submersion, waves of migration, we are often given absolute figures with thousands of people, but it is important to relate these announced numbers of migrants to the population which is already on site to see, for example, to what extent it contributes to demographic change,” underlines Cris Beauchemin. This also makes it possible to verify that in terms of welcoming asylum seeker and refugee populations, “France is not at all, at all, at all among the most generous countries”.
In 2022, 7 million immigrants live in France, or 10.3% of the total population, according to INSEE, out of 67.6 million inhabitants. Immigrants remain “a minority”, notes the Désinfox Migrations network of researchers in its note on the myth of migratory submergence. The increase in long-term immigrants settling in France is “moderate, because some enter, settle and others leave”. Thus in 2010, 307,111 immigrants staying more than a year in the country were counted, there were 385,591 people in 2019.
“There is no submersion” in France
In 2021, a team of researchers from INED studied what could be measured in terms of international migration in the journal Population & Societies. One of the conclusions of this research is that France is one of the countries with the lowest immigration in Western Europe, which is still the case today. The researchers thus compared the population growth rates between 2010 and 2019. And showed that there are 3.7 more people per 1,000 inhabitants in France each year, including 3.3 people due to the natural balance and 0 .4 more people due to apparent net migration.
“The increase in population in France is much more due to the fact that there are births than to the fact that there are arrivals of migrants,” explains Cris Beauchemin, who participated in this research. In reality, migration contributes very little to increasing the population in France. So, there is no submersion”, contrary to what Eric Ciotti says.
When the number of residence permits is inflated
The president of the Republicans inflates the figure for residence permits, since 316,174 first residence permits were issued in 2022, a figure increasing by 11.8% compared to 2021, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior (and not 500,000 as indicated a little quickly on his X account). If we add to the residence permits, the temporary residence permits issued to Ukrainians (65,833) and the asylum applications having received a positive response (56,276), we arrive at 438,283.
But points out Cris Beauchemin, “this information on residence permits does not count Europeans who do not need them, but they are the first to emigrate to France. There is a distorted representation in terms of geographical origin. The idea of submersion by Africa is false. »
Compared to its European neighbors, France ranks 16th among immigration countries in a Europe of 28, with 13% of immigrants living in the country, reports the researcher. “France is in the European average, but it is still behind a country like Germany where the proportion is 18%, or Spain and the United Kingdom, which are at 14%, indicates Cris Beauchemin. Once again, we are not at all the champions of welcoming migrants in Europe. »