A major study from France’s premier public research institute found “a society profoundly marked by long-term immigration,” with around a third of the population estimated to have been born abroad or to have been the child or grandchild of immigrants.
Research from the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris has perhaps provided the clearest picture of France’s demographic makeup, a country officially governed by a colourblind doctrine that prohibits the collection of racial or ethnic statistics in its census, making systematic tracking of immigrant groups difficult.
According to the findings, which were based on interviews with 27,000 people in mainland France between 2019 and 2020, one in three people in the country are either migrants themselves or the descendants of immigrants.
The INED study found that 13 per cent were foreign-born, while 11 per cent were the children of immigrants, and 10 per cent were the grandchildren of immigrants, Le Figaro reported.
The authors of the study said that the impact of immigration in France is like “a kaleidoscope whose complexity is continuously expanding”. The research found that 41 per cent of the population have some tie to immigration, whether through personal heritage, marriage, or the marriage of their children.
Much of this has been imposed on the country without consent, with the report finding that among immigrants who came to France after the age of 16, around one in five had either entered illegally or were otherwise “undocumented” at some point after arriving.
Immigration to France is also overwhelmingly non-European. The INED study found that the largest cohort of immigrants aged 18 to 59 at 32 per cent came from the North African Maghreb region, much of which was previously under French colonial rule. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of immigrants hailed from sub-Saharan Africa and 16 per cent from Asia. Just 28 per cent came from other European nations.
This has had significant impacts on the country’s cultural cohesion, with non-European populations, including those born in the country, finding it much more difficult to integrate.
The authors of the study found that “only the descendants of European immigrants follow the expected assimilationist model, distancing themselves from the origins of their parents and benefiting from a form of invisibility in French society.”
In contrast, the study found that those of non-European origin were more likely to see themselves as having a “hyphenated identity” in which they differed from the rest of the country because of their ethnicity or religion.
“The analysis calls into question a simplistic assimilationist vision which would suggest that relationships with origins become diluted over generations… The results reveal a dynamic of hybridization and the emergence of ethnicized and racialized identities,” the study found.
This backs up other polling, which has found that younger Muslims in France, for example, are significantly more radical than previous generations of Muslims in the country, with six in ten Muslims aged 18-25 preferring Sharia over French law and four in ten backing a radical Islamist group like the Muslim Brotherhood. The Institut français d’opinion publique (Ifop), which has tracked Muslim opinion in France over the past three decades, said that the poll had “exceeded the most pessimistic estimates” about integration.
Nevertheless, the rapid demographic changes in France have been hailed by those on the far-left, including presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Moroccan-born Sicilian-Spaniard, who has begun to openly embrace the term “Great Replacement” and hail the coming of a “New France”.