The Immigrant and the Law of Consensus

Immigration has become central to debates in French state media since the Right’s return to power in 1986 and the expansion of the National Front’s electoral base. All reforms to entrance and residence requirements for foreigners in France have moved in the direction of limiting access to citizenship. In 1993, three government position papers took center stage. Introduced by Minister of Justice Pierre Méhaignerie and Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua, these papers formed the basis for three laws adopted that summer. The Méhaignerie law made it obligatory for children born in France to foreign nationals to apply for French citizenship between the ages of sixteen and twenty one. It also ended the citizenship of children whose parents were born in former French territories before these territories had obtained independence. A foreigner marrying a French citizen now had to wait longer, two years, before obtaining citizenship. At the same time, the law prohibited granting residence to foreigners on the pretext of discouraging fraudulent marriages. The Pasqua laws facilitated increased identity checks and restricted access to residence permits. They provided grounds for refusing or withdrawing residence from polygamous foreigners and added new criteria for family reunification. On July 12, 1993, this article appeared in the French daily newspaper Libération.

It is noteworthy that the system set in place by the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws—on citizenship codes, immigration controls, and expanded identity checks—was broadly accepted by the Left. This acceptance was essentially based on two arguments. First, that an immigration problem that must be courageously faced objectively exists. With Michel Rocard, the socialists had already understood the impossibility of welcoming “all the suffering in the world.”8 Second, with courageous actions necessary, it was better that the Right not take them. Better that the necessary amputation be undertaken according to human rights and the law. As Charles Pasqua also said, it was only a matter of giving coherence and force of law to disparate measures imposed by the urgent need for punctual solutions to specific problems. So in a sense there was nothing new here, except the advantage, pleasing to those enamored of the rule of law, of replacing haphazard regulations with legislation.

The argument of an objective situation that must be faced courageously easily seduces those who never stop repenting (generally at the expense of others) of their past transgressions, only forgetting that the first principle of these digressions is precisely a blind adherence to the so-called objectivity of historical necessity. Frustrated hope does not make reality any more than disowning hope makes thought. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the disappointments of contemporary history, it is that there is no such thing as objective necessity, or objective problems in politics. We wind up with the political problems that we choose, generally because we already have answers to them. It is simply a political choice to declare that the arrival of illegal workers, the problems of junior high schools in the suburbs, the phenomenon of delinquency among youth born in France to French-born parents, fraudulent or supposedly fraudulent marriages, and social deficits all arise from the same immigration problem.

Those who dispute this are told to leave the affluent neighborhoods that have gestated their opinions and investigate what is taking place in the suburbs. Not long ago, one was urged to visit the assembly line to observe the treatment of immigrant workers in factories. Today, one is instead urged to visit the suburbs to observe the treatment of factory workers by immigrants. This argument never fails to induce guilt. This move from assembly line to suburb, and the logic of these social problems, according to which our politicians position themselves as realist diagnosticians and courageous surgeons, must be questioned. Socialist or liberal, our governments have adopted the same doctrine. In our era, politics is the rule of necessity, identified solely with the capricious and inevitable demands of the global market. Politicians base their legitimacy on showing that they can’t do anything other than what they are already doing: recording, month after month, the whims of the almighty market and managing the consequences for their populations at the lowest possible cost. They understand politics as a refusal of all policies except the managing of consequences. They have systematically dismantled the working world, not simply out of obedience to this necessity but also because it bore the visible stamp of the political: that of a society divided and living in conflict. All factory closures end up with a satisfied reference to the end of a myth and constitute proof that—because the myth is being successfully destroyed—good realist policies are being adopted.

The problem is that, by destroying these myths, they are not only jeopardizing systems of social regulation, such as social security and education, but also the ability of a society founded on conflict to welcome otherness. Numerically, we don’t have many more immigrants than we did twenty years ago. But these foreigners had another name and another identity twenty years ago. They were called workers. Today they are no more than immigrants, people with different skin and alien moralities. The stage is thus set on the ruins of identities and political otherness. On one side, there is the appearance of diffuse so-called social problems—in the streets, in junior high schools, in social security organizations—created by the groups most at risk, particularly within the age groups most sensitive to this risk. On the other stands a figure immediately identifiable as a factor in these problems: the other who has been reduced to mere otherness. Our politicians are then told by public opinion that the problems have become critical and must be courageously resolved.

Because social problems always lead to a single, unique problem, there emerges in our society a category of problem people. These are people whose presence can no longer be tolerated. The answer is always there, preceding the question. It only remains to constitute the figure of this other and to take necessary measures against him.

This is where the law intervenes. This is what so-called progress from circumstantial measures to the generality of law consists of. Where it is supposed to resolve a problem, the law in fact constitutes it. It draws the unitary figure of an other by integrating the objects of separate laws or regulations. It unites the (bad) subject who arrives illegally to look for work with the (bad) subject who arrives legally as a partner in a fraudulent marriage. It turns a French youth of Maghrebian origin, an undocumented Sri Lankan worker, an Algerian woman who has just given birth in Marseilles, and the father of a Malian family applying for reunification into the same undesirable foreigner. A small vocabulary of shared concepts underlies this. “Illegal,” for example, comes to mediate between “foreigner” and “delinquent.”

It is said that the law allows a distinction to be made between good foreigners and undesirables, and thus that it fights a racism based on lumping the two together. Exactly the opposite is true. And Judge Marsaud gave the game away.9 Foreigner and suspect are identified with each other, reducing all otherness to the figure of a guilty illegality. The law objectivizes a diffuse feeling of insecurity and converts a multitude of cases and groups into a single object of fear. From there, the law constructs a figure that society must cast out in order to be rid of its problems: this other that cancerously spreads across the body politic. By tying fraudulent marriages to family reunification through the insistent representation of the Muslim polygamist, the law imposes the image of an object of fear and rejection. And, in opposition to this image, it identifies the sovereign people as those who feel this fear.

This is what “consensus” means: not the romantic absurdity of responsible partners together discussing facts and solutions to objective problems, but the immediate identification of the subject who fears. Political consensus does not usually emerge from reasonable opinion. It arises from unreasonable passion. Primarily, people experience consensus not among, but rather against each other. To participate in consensus is to feel together what we cannot feel.

This is the double bind of consensus. First, it accompanies a denial of politics and abdication in favor of its opposites: bare necessity and social problems. Who seriously imagines that a world of excessively deregulated and unstructured labor created through such consensus would not lead to phenomena such as under-the-table work, destabilization of systems of social protection, and diffuse delinquency? The consequence of this is, of course, that the state, so modest in its day-to-day management of global necessity’s local consequences, blithely resumes a course of repression.

The transformation of political choices and conflicts into social problems is also a transformation of the object of the problem into an object of hatred. Some leftists, wishing to express a certain reticence while still anxious to be seen as realists, got out of the dilemma by predicting that the law will not be effective. Certainly, a law against entering the country illegally is condemned to the limited effectiveness of any law that attempts to restrain those who would violate it. However, the law may well be effective by keeping alive a shared resentment of undesirables and encouraging good citizens to support the goal of zero immigration.

Racism is not an unfortunate consequence of social problems that the objectivity of a consensual policy should resolve. So-called social problems, consensual realism, and racist outbursts are all aspects of one and the same phenomenon. Left-wing thought has been imprisoned in this logic for a decade. The resentment of intellectuals against their lovers of yesterday took care of the rest. It has become fashionable to dismiss opposition to the senseless system that is being put in place as coming from nostalgic, outmoded, third-world solidarity activism, and from nice but numbskulled youths who confuse politics with festive social gatherings. This cheap realism must end. Realists are always lagging behind reality. Absolute opposition to the system created by these three nefarious laws is not a display of old-fashioned nice feelings ignorant of the harsh reality of politics. On the contrary, it is an attempt to restore—in opposition to the illusions of managerial realism and its criminal consequences—the dimension of political action capable of dealing with social divisions and otherness. Consensual realism is not a form of natural healing capable of ridding society of its monsters, but a new madness that nurtures them. Dissent is what makes society livable. And politics, when it is not reduced to petty management and police work, is precisely the organization of this dissent.

8 The socialist Michel Rocard was Prime Minister when he stated, in 1990, that “France can’t welcome all the suffering of the world, but must know how to shoulder its part.”

9 A vigorous champion of security checks, the judge and right-wing Member of Parliament Alain Marsaud introduced a legal amendment in 1993 aimed at legalizing identity checks on any grounds except race.