A Review of Patrick Weil's New Book
On immigration in France
A review of Patrick Weil, De l’immigration en France (Paris: Grasset, 2026).
No political issue today has greater salience than immigration. The immigration issue has been central to the rise of far-right political parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and beyond.
The rhetoric around immigration often intentionally inflames passions. The issue can be conjugated in a variety of tenses, persons, and moods. Immigrants can be denounced for being too lazy or too ambitious; too abject or too privileged; too impoverished or too wealthy; too zealous or too lax in their religious practice; too ignorant or too educated; too ripe for exploitation or too haughty to accept relegation to a secondary status.
At bottom, the gravamen of the charge against immigrants is that they are different. Right-wing discourse thrives on difference, the basic building block of hierarchy, its raison d’être, whereas left-wing discourse, always yearning for equality and universality, is embarrassed by it. Despite this embarrassment, difference remains an obdurate fact, a durable problem for every variety of egalitarian ideology, which the left ignores at its peril. So what is to be done?
The very ubiquity of the issue suggests that transnational comparisons may be helpful. The conditions surrounding immigration, the political responses to it, and the ensuing political transformations and realignments vary from place. Immigration has ranked high on the French political agenda since the rise of the Front National (now called the Rassemblement National) more than half a century ago. Like the United States, albeit in somewhat different form. France has birthright citizenship (called droit du sol in French). The country is therefore a natural object of comparison.
To help us understand the French situation, we are fortunate to have a newly published book by one of France’s leading experts on immigration, Patrick Weil: De l’immigration en France. The immigration question has preoccupied Weil for much of his career. In 1997 he authored a government report entitled “Pour une politique de l’immigration juste et efficace” (For a Just and Effective Immigration Policy), and in subsequent years he has published often on the subject, including La France et ses étrangers: Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? (France and Its Foreigners: What is a Frenchman?) and De la laïcité en France (On laïcité in France). In 2003 he served as a member of the so-called Stasi Commission, appointed by President Jacques Chirac to consider whether the growing presence of Muslim immigrants on French soil warranted changes in the laws governing religious expression. Weil also teaches at Yale Law School for part of each year, so he is deeply familiar with the differences between French and American approaches to immigration issues.
Immigration is an emotional issue. A 2025 poll revealed that 67% of the French agreed with their then prime minister, the centrist François Bayrou, that the native population was being “submerged” by waves of immigrants. Taken to an extreme, this feeling of submersion leads to the so-called “great replacement” theory, most closely associated with the far right-wing writer Renaud Camus, according to which mass immigration has been encouraged by an elite cabal determined to perpetuate its ascendancy by creating an immigrant underclass. This theory of the extreme right finds its mirror image in the far-left idea of a dynamic and energetic “new France” that will sweep conservative elites from power and turn the country in a new direction—an idea that Jean-Luc Mélenchon hopes will carry him to the presidency.
Weil’s book has the great merit of situating these recent fears of submersion by immigration in a broader historical and political context. As long ago as 1889, the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès voiced fears that “new Frenchmen whom we are not strong enough to assimilate have slipped in among us … and seek to impose on us their ways of seeing and feeling. … The name ‘France’ might well survive, but our country’s distinctive character would nevertheless be destroyed.” Yet at the time the number of children of immigrants who became naturalized was quite small.
After World War I, political leaders envisioned a more liberal naturalization policy to help compensate for the massive population loss due to the war. The far-right newspaper Action française railed against the fabrication of “paper Frenchmen.” After adoption of the policy, François Coty, the editor of the mainstream paper Le Figaro, was even more virulent: “Three million robust, healthy, honest Frenchmen have been driven to the slaughterhouse so that they could be replaced by the world’s vermin. … The occult world government of ‘The Three Hundred,’ … a veritable International, has decided to replace the French race with another … [which will] impose its unpatriotic theories on us before driving us out or exterminating us.”
As extravagant and blood-curdling as this rhetoric was, it did in its overheated way reflect actual demographic changes. “In 1930,” Weil writes, “France had a higher percentage of immigrants in its population than any other country (515 per 100,000, compared with 492 for the United States.” In the wake of the Depression, 800,000 Polish immigrants were sent home from France, while Spanish refugees, German Jews, Armenians, and Russians were spared deportation, the right of asylum being deemed “one of the essential elements of republican doctrine,” according to Édouard Herriot.
French attitudes toward immigration continued to evolve with events: Vichy’s hostility to foreigners gave way in the postwar era to a desire to do away with national quotas, which were seen as unacceptable by many appalled by the racist atrocities of World War II. Huge postwar needs for manpower encouraged a loosening of immigration restrictions, and many new workers flowed in from countries such as Algeria.
When the labor market tightened after the oil shock of the 1970s, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing envisioned sending half a million Algerian workers back to their homeland, at first voluntarily but later under compulsion. The left and some churches protested, and the Conseil d’État refused to ratify Giscard’s proposal. The president nevertheless ordered the minister of foreign affairs to seek Algiers’ agreement to accept 35,000 returnees per year. In the archives of the Quai d’Orsay, Weil found a document admonishing the negotiators to “avoid mentioning any child quotas.” In an interview with Claude Chayet, who was responsible for immigration issues in the foreign ministry at the time, Weil learned that the foreign minister, Jean François-Poncet, was appalled when Chayet pointed out that enforcing Giscard’s order would require canceling the residence permits of thousands of legal immigrants, arresting them, and “forcing them onto busses, trains, and ships before the TV cameras of the entire world. And the children—they’re French. What is to be done with them? Will you separate them from their families? Will you deport French children along with their parents?” When confronted with these unpalatable realities, the foreign minister agreed that Giscard’s policy was unworkable, and it was quietly dropped. An American reader in 2026 may be forgiven for wishing that such internal resistance had been mounted to the U.S. government’s deportation policies in the second Trump administration.
Skipping ahead in this history, Weil notes that “the great replacement theory” made its way back into French discourse well before Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement in 2011. Indeed, the centrist intellectual review Le Débat published in 1990 an article by sociologist Paul Yonnet attacking the immigration policies of the socialist government of Michel Rocard: “The media constantly admonish us to respect the right to be different while saying nothing about the long-term project of cultural deportation of French identity.” Cultural deportation of French identity—a concept as meaningless as it is inflammatory, to the point where one wonders how it made its way into the sober pages of a respected journal.
In the same issue of Le Débat, demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais denounced “an unavowed policy of quasi-exclusive preference for Africans on foreign policy grounds on which the political establishment has achieved remarkable agreement.” In 1996, the sociologist Bruno Latour objected in the pages of Le Monde to a proposed ban on racist and xenophobic pronouncements. For Latour, the law would force the French to “look upon acceptance of foreigners as an actual fact, … a natural, ineluctable fact.” Antiracist laws, he argued, had the effect of “naturalizing” race. These words were written more than two decades before Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Parents Involved decision that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
As these examples make clear, the idea of a “great replacement” of the existing population by hordes of immigrants imported at the behest of a shadowy elite cabal has a lengthy history in France (and elsewhere). To counter the phantasmagoric image of wholesale civilizational transformation, Weil relies on a systematic exposition of the facts surrounding immigration. In 2025, for example, France issued a total of 384,000 new residence permits to foreigners wishing to live in France, of which 118,000 went to students, 92,600 to refugees and others seeking humanitarian relief, and 62,000 to “economic migrants.” Such numbers do not suggest a tidal wave of immigration. Nor does the fact that between 1999 and 2024, the immigrant population in France increased from 4.3 to 7.7 million out of a total of 68 million. An average increase of just 133,000 per year does not constitute a “submersion” of the tens of millions of natives but rather a manageable addition to an aging population.
Nevertheless, the stark fact remains that 67% of the population accepts the term “submersion.” In a democracy, an opinion shared by 67% of the population is significant even if it represents a distortion of reality. Why has this opinion become so prevalent? As Weil points out, between 1975 and 1999, the share of immigrants in the population remained virtually stable (7.4% in 1975, 7.3% in 1999), but between 1999 and 2024 it increased from 7.3% to 11.3%. This increase coincided with important economic changes, including a dramatic increase in global trade, offshoring of important aspects of manufacturing production, and increased industrial employment of immigrant labor. At the same time, the 1985 Schengen Agreement and the EU’s move toward a Single Market diminished the psychological significance of international borders, contributing to the perception that the barriers that had once defined the nation and culture had become permeable. Terrorist attacks linked to immigrants undoubtedly heightened suspicion of the alien Other. Although immigration was only one component of these large-scale changes, for many citizens it became the most tangible and immediate sign that the contours of the society they had known in the Trente Glorieuses period of postwar growth and improved living standards were changing in ways of which they disapproved. Sentiment gradually shifted against immigrants, and the xenophobic Front National gained new adherents.
Another source of resentment against immigrants is the so-called Aide Médicale d’État (AME), which pays for medical treatment for foreigners on French soil even if their status is irregular. In 2024, Weil reports, 484,000 persons benefited from the AME, costing the state one billion euros (0.5% of total medical insurance outlays). Not all AME recipients are in France unlawfully, but a substantial number are: some 124,000 were ordered to leave France in 2024.
Illegal immigration gives rise, Weil notes, to hypocrisies of both the right and left. On the right, people who vote for anti-immigrant parties freely admit that their businesses often rely on immigrant labor “because there is no one else to do the work,” while on the left, the most frequent answer to the question of how to deal with illegal immigration is “to regularize the illegals” [p. 51] “It is as if right and left, for different and even opposite reasons, refuse to recognize that France has once again become a land of immigration and therefore needs to develop an immigration policy.” He goes on to outline such a policy in some detail. His suggestions invariably have merit, although some will inevitably provoke more disagreement than others. To mention just one, Weil remains faithful to the conclusion of the Stasi Commission on which he served, namely, that the wearing of visible signs of religious affiliation should be prohibited in public schools. It reached this conclusion on the grounds that “wearing the [Islamic] veil or imposing it on others had become a matter not of individual liberty but of national strategy on the part of an organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was using the public schools as its principal battlefield.” There is no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood did attempt to exert its influence in this way. But there is also no doubt that some young women would choose, if permitted, to express their cultural, religious, or even individual difference by wearing the veil if permitted. Much has been written about the difference between American and French liberal points of view on such matters. My disagreement with Weil on this point no doubt reflects the bias of my origins. That is why I find reading him so profitable: there is no better guide to the nuances of liberal thinking on such matters of cultural identity.