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Catherine Wihtol de Wenden is research director at CNRS. Author ofMigration Atlas (Otherwise, 2021), she has just published a test: Immigration. Indifference, indignation, dehumanization (Otherwise, 160 pages, 19 euros).

Prime Minister, François Bayrou, recently said that there was a feeling of migratory “submersion” in France. Does that correspond to a reality?

The use of the term “submersion” is political calculation: it is intended to “tribute” on the right, while the Prime Minister feels less supported on the left. You have to put things back in reality. The word “submersion” is inappropriate: with around 10 % of immigrants, France is in the European average. In terms of asylum, it's the same thing. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France has just welcomed 4 % of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war. Those who went to Europe preferred to go to Poland, Germany, Italy or Spain because there was, in these countries, anterior economic immigration of Ukrainians.

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For the Syrians fleeing the Bashar al-Assad regime, it is the same thing: when France welcomed between 2015 and 2016 around 11,000 Syrian asylum seekers, Germany registered more than 420,000. There were, in this country, more jobs, better wages and the ancient presence of a migration from the Middle East-in the 1970s, Kurds from Syria, Turkey and Iraq settled in Germany, and they were joined, in the 1980s, by Syrians who fled the Damascus regime.

You underline, in your work “Immigration.” Indifference, indignation, dehumanization “ that migratory movements have accelerated since the end of the XXe century. For what ?

A first phase of mass immigration occurs at the end of the 19th centurye century, during which Europeans have migrated inside the continent or left to populate new worlds, United States, Canada, Australia. From 1989, the planet entered a new mass of mass immigration, because emigration suddenly became possible in many places, especially in Eastern Europe, thanks to the end of the iron curtain. China has also opened at that time, as well as many southern countries which had a double political and economic interest to let out their youth.

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Source: Lemonde

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