“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen that!” », rejoices the Générations des Yvelines MP Benjamin Lucas: a meeting where the entire parliamentary left is there to talk about immigration. It is Générations, therefore, the party created by Benoît Hamon upon his departure from the PS, and its four deputies elected with Nupes, which brought together on Monday evening the leaders of the four groups of the former alliance on the project of immigration law. A way for this small party to continue to play the Christmas elves of the union of the left. Another almost unitary meeting will take place this Thursday evening in Saint-Ouen, at the initiative of the PS, with ecologists, communists and a few rebels, but opponents of the direction of the movement.
If this excitement says a lot about the efforts of everyone to show that Nupes is not completely dead, it also says that the parliamentary left has woken up on immigration. Faced with polls which lean towards a tightening of legislation, “the left has itself organized its powerlessness on these subjects” over the last forty years, says Benjamin Lucas, who will lead the environmental group on the bill which will arrive on Monday in session in the Assembly. “It started in the 1980s, when Laurent Fabius said ‘the National Front asks the right questions without providing the right answers’. If we are here, it is to say that no, the far right is not asking the right questions. » But then, what are the arguments – old or new, put forward by the left?
The argument counterattacks: the French way of life
Let’s start with the newest and most striking argument, which we hear more and more on the left. It was Benoît Hamon, now head of the NGO Singa, which works to welcome refugees or asylum seekers, who used it on Monday evening. “We are told that migration should be stopped because it calls into question our way of life” But for him, “these ingredients of our identity which are threatened”, they are not a tradition, a religion, but “a high level of public service which guaranteed that wherever one was on French territory, one had access to care, education and public mobility.”
“If this station closed, is it the responsibility of the Syrians? If this school closed, is it the responsibility of the Afghans?…. », asks Benoît Hamon ironically. Of course, according to him, the answer is no. “Better”, he considers that migration is a potential solution to maintain this high level of public service, taking the example of pensions: the contribution of foreigners “to the system is positive, they bring more money than they will withdraw it in the form of a pension. (…) Anyone who wants to stop immigration must say how much they are raising the legal retirement age. Otherwise, he does not follow through with his reasoning. »
The anti-racist argument:
To protect himself against the accusation of “utilitarianism” with regard to immigration, Benoît Hamon adds: his first argument also holds because “the Republic has never been an ethnic project, but a political project” . This is where we switch to a more anti-racist argument. Benjamin Lucas, often lyrical, assures that the left must lead the battle against “an atmospheric racism which invades society”. It is above all Andy Kerbrat, leader of the LFI group on the immigration bill, who took the sword against the arguments of the RN and what he judges to be the silence of the Macronists.
“The question for them is not who is a migrant, it is who is Muslim. They display widespread, dripping Islamophobia. Their one and only objective is to make this famous amalgam of delinquency-terrorist-foreigner. » The deputy for Loire-Atlantique concluded with an intersectional argument: “Fighting against the Darmanin law is fighting against racism, that of LR, Renaissance, RN, but it is also fighting against capitalism, because it is it which uses and mistreats all the most precarious. »
The testimony argument: happy immigration
Boris Vallaud, the president of the socialist group, chooses to tell a story. “That of a young Landes man, because he plays rugby and goes to the Landes race, he is starting to have an accent. But the truth obliges me to say that in reality, he was born in Guinea. His name is Moussa. » The Chalosse MP says that he met him a few years ago and that Moussa, “the tortured body”, had “engraved the path of his exile” on his arm. In France, Moussa studied, first obtaining the college certificate, then becoming an apprentice to a building painter.
“I saw him take part in the competition for Best Apprentices in France and fall into the arms of his supervisor, who cried and thanked him. » Boris Vallaud also indicates that he helped him obtain papers when he became an adult, which many parliamentarians do, even on the right. “There are plenty of courses like this. these are the happy stories that the right and the extreme right refuse us to face. »
The amnesia argument: immigration laws are a failure
Cyrielle Chatelain, the president of the environmental group in the Assembly, is fed up. Fed up with being told, on the right, among the Macronists, that we are doing nothing about immigration in France while “we have never legislated as much on immigration as in recent years. We have never made life so difficult for those who decide to build their lives in France.”
The member for Isère has counted: since the 1980s, we have legislated every 17 months on the subject. “And always in the same direction. That is to say, toughening the entry and installation conditions. » Obviously, these laws are ineffective. “Perhaps it’s not us who are blind, but they who have amnesia. (…) Convincing yourself that nothing has been done is easier than opposing the rampant ideas of the extreme right.”