« Immigration : fabrique d’un discours de crise » by Louis Imbert

• Presentation of the author and the book

The other is Louis Imbert, a Franco-American researcher at the Ecole de Droit de SciencePo. He was previously a tutor and then an assistant at the Migration Clinic of the same school. He has also taught comparative (Franco-US) immigration law and the constitutional law of the Fifth Republic at Sciences Po University. He works more specifically on the study of immigration law and migration policy and has written a research paper on asylum law for sexual minorities and on the protection of the fundamental rights of foreigners in the face of contemporary border mutations.

He began his research for this book in 2015 at a time when Europe was experiencing a significant increase in the number of asylum seekers with almost 1.2 million applications between 2015 and 2016. This period will be referred to as the ‘migration crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ from which, according to current discourses, we are still not over. “Immigration: fabrique d’un discours de crise” was published in March 2022, at the time of the French presidential election campaign where the issue of immigration or the “immigration problem” was particularly central to the debate, with the far-right party represented by Marine Le Pen obtaining 41.45% of the votes in the second ballot.

If the terms “migration crisis”, ” the problem of immigration” or “great replacement” seem to be widespread in the public debate today, they are not new and this is what Louis Imbert explains in his book. Indeed, he questions and deconstructs the notion of “migratory invasion”, by putting the immigration figures into perspective on the one hand, and by tracing the genealogy of xenophobic and anti-immigration discourses on the other hand.

• Figures to serve the discourse

Louis Imbert explains that before the use of words, the use of figures and statistics is not neutral in the discourse on immigration. For this reason, in the first part of his book he sets out to prove how figures are used to serve a xenophobic discourse.

For example, he explains that if the raw number of international migrants has increased over the last 20 years, this should be compared with the world population, which has also increased. Thus, immigration is presented as a phenomenon that has exploded over the last few decades, whereas between 1990 and 2019 it has gone from 2.9% of the population to 3.5%^[1], an increase of half a point.

While he does not deny that immigration is a central issue in our society, he calls – in the manner of demographers – for proportions to be taken into account to measure the extent of the phenomenon rather than raw figures relatively out of context. He explains that this media and political rhetoric of figures is intentionally oriented to serve a discourse and this is what he invites to question. Indeed, it is more effective for newspapers and politicians to pound out figures such as “1.2 million refugees arrived at the gates of Europe in 2015” rather than pointing out that, while this phenomenon is growing, Europe only hosts one in seven refugees worldwide.

• A genealogy of a current and yet far from new discourse

As shown in the title of the book, these figures are used to construct a crisis discourse by overestimating the extent of the phenomenon and placing it in a very short timeframe to emphasise the critical need for action. However, as Louis Imbert argues in his book, alarmist and xenophobic discourses presenting immigration as a “problem” and the immigrant as an “invader” are far from new. As he himself says rather ironically, France did not wait for the Le Pen family or Eric Zemmour to maintain this rhetoric of “migratory crisis”, “invasion”, “rush to Europe” etc. Indeed, the two postures of hospitality or hostility are not new in French public opinion, even if for several decades the second posture has tended to dominate public debate.

To put this phenomenon into perspective, Louis Imbert conducts a genealogy of discourse to trace the roots of what he describes as the ‘imaginary’ spectre of invasion. He observes that the successive economic crises have been a favourable ground for the development of such discourses, which have peaked since 1880, when the beginnings of these ideas were born among intellectuals at the time of the establishment of the Third Republic, but especially at the time of the first Great Depression. He then observes a second surge in anti-immigration discourse during the Great Depression of the 1930s when antisemitism and racism were rumbling in the newspapers and writings of many academics he cites in his book. Finally, the third notable trigger was the oil crisis in the 1970s.

What he found is that only the target of these speeches has changed since 1880, the rhetoric of the “invading” immigrant has remained the same. Throughout the speeches he quotes over the years, the terms “invader”, “problem”, “crisis” are present, as well as animal analogies (comparing immigrants to “swarms of grasshoppers coming from the south”), medical analogies (comparing migrants to bacteria infiltrating and disturbing the homogeneity of the white social organism), or meteorological analogies (comparing the arrival of migrants to torrents, waves coming to submerge France and Europe)

• Conclusion and personal comments

Reading this book, one comes to the conclusion that the term “crisis” when talking about migration is not only not new, but it is also not accurate and not meaningless. It is – in his words – “one prism of analysis among others, which in practice fulfills a political and ideological function” but also an economic one. The rhetoric of the “crisis” and the “invader” serves political agendas, but also a part of the media and editorial world^[2] that has built its prosperity on the market of xenophobic ideas. It leads to a reinforcement and militarisation of the control of the external borders of the Schengen area, which offers a new market to large industrial groups^[3] but also to organisations such as FRONTEX, whose mission based on the evaluation of the “migratory risk” has gained a central role in public policies in recent years.

In conclusion, I think this book is very interesting as it is the only one to have made such an early genealogy of the anti-immigration discourse. However, it is good to know that even if the author does not hide it, by wanting to denounce an ideology he is making the apology of another one, it is not at all an objective study and this is reflected in the numerous personal comments that the author makes in his book. It is nonetheless relevant in that it invites us as citizens but also as researchers not to forget the meaning of the words we use. The very term “crisis” when speaking of immigration has become an undisputed reality in discourse, yet it is not neutral and implies the urgent search for a “solution”, a radical political response. It is clear from this book that it reflects a reality that is more ideological than social and historical.

^[1] He quotes the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs explaining that the number of international migrants has risen from 153 million in 1990 to 272 million in 2019 (an increase of 119 million) but at the same time the world population has grown from 5.2 to 7.7 billion

^[2] He mentions Cnews and Valeurs Actuelles as examples

^[3] He mentions Airbus, Finmeccanica, Thales, Safran and Indra