2024-01-03 15:15:06
CPublic debate on immigration in France has long focused on security and identity issues. When the economy is discussed, it is always in reaction to an electoralist and populist agenda: do immigrants take the jobs of the French and do they cost more than they bring to the state budget? It is symptomatic that the only two truly economic aspects of the law concern professions in shortage and more restrictive conditions for the payment of social benefits to immigrants. Nothing in the long term.
However, from an economic point of view, immigration is both the price of a country’s success and, in a globalized world, a condition of its future growth. In themselves and through the diversity they bring, immigrants are a source of innovation, creation, entrepreneurship and integration into the global economy. This is obvious for skilled immigration.
In the United States, immigrants represent a quarter of entrepreneurs or innovators and more than a third of professors in the most prestigious universities. The causality is two-way: success and the American dream attract the most qualified, and the skills and diversity they bring nourish the dynamism, productivity and growth of the American economy.
Less-skilled immigration also brings economic benefits. Beyond the demographic aspects of sustainability of pension systems, immigrants are largely complementary to native workers. The fact that they “practice jobs that the French don’t want”to use a cliché, is no less true, and moreover their concentration in personal services makes it possible to free up qualified work, particularly for women.
Humiliating failure
Ultimately, immigration is a fundamental strategic asset in international economic competition; to deprive yourself of it is to shoot yourself in the foot, and that is exactly what France has been doing for fifty years now, going once morest the grain of most other OECD countries. [Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques]. Rather than referring to the numerous studies which demonstrate this, let us consider the painful and almost humiliating failure of France in the race to produce a vaccine once morest Covid-19.
Our national champions were outdone by Pfizer, a company as multinational as it is multicultural, whose collaboration with BioNTech, a German unicorn founded by researchers of Turkish origin, was as successful as we know; and by Moderna, an American company created ten years previously by three founders including a Lebanese-Armenian immigrant and a Chinese-American, established in Sweden, and managed by… a Frenchman. Why did France fail? It cannot be ruled out that it is the fault of immigrants… who we have not been able to attract, promote, integrate.
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