On May 4, 1997, this article was published in the Brazilian journal La Folha de São Paulo.
The French state has just enacted a new scene in the long drama called The Immigrant Question. There is a new law aimed at strengthening the fight against illegal immigration. Prepared by the Minister of the Interior, it was passed by the liberal Right when the socialist Left forgot to show up for the vote. Public debate only arose because of the huge protest movement that started with the petition by a group of filmmakers against a law requiring landlords to inform local authorities of the arrival and departure of foreigners. This protest movement may appear to be no more than a moral protest—pitting the old laws of hospitality against the national interest. But more profoundly, it exposes the strange logic of a kind of legislation and the state system it represents.
The problem is that, three years previously, the former Minister of the Interior had already passed a major bill aimed at stemming illegal immigration. Apparently, it did not achieve its goal. Indeed, laws that specifically pursue those who violate them are always of limited effect. While the law failed to impede new illegal arrivals, the law did succeed in transforming a number of noncitizens who had been in France legally for ten or fifteen years into illegal aliens. In 1996, a lengthy hunger strike and several support movements brought this paradoxical consequence to public attention and demanded that the status of these undocumented migrants be regularized. The government, however, took things in the opposite direction. Because there was now a greater number of illegal immigrants than before, a new law against them had become necessary. This will doubtlessly produce more illegal immigration, again necessitating the introduction of yet another new law.
When an action so obviously misses its mark, it is generally assumed the author lacks sense, or that the real aim is not the one advertised. The reason these anti-immigrant laws and measures have been so ineffective is that they are less concerned with reducing the number of immigrants than with showing that the government is tirelessly engaged in the effort. This show has a specific target audience. It is aimed at the extreme Right, which has made immigration its battleground, hoping to attract voters from the poor suburbs, which are troubled by difficult cohabitation issues. The real logic of this repeated legislative ritual can be expressed as follows: there is an immigration problem, and this problem results in racism and the rise of the extreme Right. The Right propagates racist ideas, which is unfortunate, and which, even worse, steals votes. The best way to fight against this is to seize the battlefield by waging a constant struggle against immigration.
Unfortunately, the outcome of this tactic seems as uncertain as that of its predecessor. It has been twelve years since the first socialist Prime Minister declared that the extreme Right had raised a good question about immigration, and that it had only made the mistake of giving the wrong answer, that of inciting hatred against immigrants. Since then, the logic of adopting formal, reasonable racist measures in order to disarm the wild passions of racism has had time to prove itself. It has not decreased the number of voices on the extreme racist Right in the least. In fact, the Right has continued to gain ground, both electorally and in the credibility of its arguments.
The circle seems complete. Not only have the results consistently contradicted the aims, but no one can any longer tell means from ends, or causes from effects. Should we make laws to reduce immigration because there are too many immigrants? Or should we make laws against immigration to reduce the racism underlying complaints against immigrants? How to reduce racism? Eliminate immigration in the hope that racism disappears for lack of a target? Or wage a constant fight against immigration to prove to racists that we are just as racist as they are, and that they therefore have no need to exist?
This circle of means and ends, causes and effects, reveals the circularity of the so-called consensual political system. This system assumes that the political is governed by objective problems arising from the necessities of the global economic and geopolitical order, problems that leave no room for alternative choices at the national level. This has a two-sided result. On the one hand, the traditional Right and Left share a realist understanding of the facts. They both believe that governments are limited to managing, at the lowest possible cost, the local consequences of globalization, such as issues of unemployment and immigration. Their competition is therefore no longer over fundamental choices, but rather consists of asserting a greater capacity to deal rationally with the problem arising from the intersection of unemployment and immigration rates. The only argument each party has left to fling is that their opponent is encouraging the racist extreme Right due to an utter lack of other ideas.
We could look at this as a simple show of electoral opportunism. Each party must square the circle and adopt an antiracist stance by denouncing the racist extreme Right, and each party must also adopt a racist stance by denouncing the inability of the opposing party to resolve the so-called immigrant problem. But in fact the issue runs deeper. Following the famous Marxist formula, the mystification is in the question itself. To be able to solve the immigrant problem, we must first be able to pose it. And that is precisely where the impossibility lies. This is not to say that problems of violence and insecurity related to the presence of heterogeneous communities do not exist in the suburbs of French cities, just as in many other big cities. But these difficulties of cohabitation do not make an immigrant problem. The word “immigrant” lumps together extremely heterogeneous categories. Particularly in France, many of the criticized individuals are French, born in France to parents made French by colonization.
The contradiction between declared aims and achieved results thus becomes clearer. Claiming to resolve the immigration problem through restrictive legislation means attempting something impossible in practice. However, this imaginary solution to a problem that cannot be formulated has a real impact. All of these laws in effect provide a figure for the concept of the immigrant. These laws give coherence to the figure of the undesirable. In doing so, they strengthen a discourse that asserts, first, that there is an inevitable problem with undesirable foreigners, and second, that the consensual parties of government are unable to resolve the problem.
Thus the circle becomes a spiral. Measures aimed at fighting racism rationally only increase its legitimacy. Racism alone occupies the imaginary aspect of the apparent problem with undesirable foreigners, while leaving the consensual parties the task of providing the problem with a rational formulation and then completely failing to solve it. This spiral is a mode of governance. Consensus realists claim to have eliminated all ideological and class battles in favor of the unique consideration of objective necessity and rational solutions. The development of new forms of identitarianism and racism only completes this operation. The paradox is that the ground on which the conflicting consensual forces compete is provided to them from outside—in fact, by the very extremists whose problems and solutions they rationalize. This also means that this exterior force becomes, little by little, the most interior, central law.