Despite the transpartisan rejection of immigration, the number of valid residence permits (4.5 million, according to the results of the General Directorate of Foreigners in France) has been increasing for years. Everyone then has their own opinion: while some speak of irreversible demographic upheaval if the curves are not reversed, others, in the name of an economic model to be maintained, affirm that we cannot do without it. In any case, the various explanations show us that immigration cannot be thought seriously without evoking other subjects: the ideal of growth, the demographic collapse of our country and the economic upheaval of recent decades.
In 2024, the French had 15,000 fewer babies than the previous year – which gives us one of the worst figures in thirty years. Concerning our European neighbors, the observation is even more terrifying: the average is between 1.3 and 1.4 children per woman with records of underfertility in Italy, Spain, Germany. In Spain, for example, the government has just decided to regularize half a million undocumented immigrants to support growth.
European demographic suicide
Over the past five decades, the share of people under 20 in the population has continued to decline – while the share of seniors (people aged at least fifty) increasingly dominates. “This inversion of the age pyramid, which results from the thirty-year persistence of fertility that is largely insufficient to ensure the replacement of generations, has been amplified for twenty years by the decline in mortality after age 50”notes demographer Philippe Bourcier de Carbon.
Since 1997, Europe has been less populated than Africa, where the age pyramid is completely inverted with less than twenty seniors, aged 50 and over, for every hundred young people who have not yet reached 20 years of age. Fleeing economic stagnation and the multiple conflicts ravaging their countries, all these young populations from Africa and the Near and Middle East make up these endless immigration flows which are pouring into Europe. “If our Rhine cousins welcomed nearly a million Syrian refugees in 2015 and a million Ukrainian refugees in 2022, it is less out of Christian charity than out of economic realism”estimates Maxime Sbaihi on the German case.
The sacrifice of productive France
Pierre Vermeren, in his book France which is downgrading (2019), returns to this tragedy that was the amputation of capital for the social and economic fabric of France. After the war, more than 6 million agricultural jobs disappeared; not to mention, since 1984, the 3.5 million industrial jobs – often under the pretext of creating companies on a European or global scale. Entry into the euro will only have reinforced these phenomena of deindustrialization and agricultural withdrawal.
“The French people were never consulted to give their opinion”
All this happened at the same time as the increase in unemployment (0.5 million in 1975 and 6.5 million in 2018), the end of labor immigration in favor of family reunification, and the loss of national sovereignty in the name of European integration. Common point of these transformations: the French people were never consulted to give their opinion – at least yes, in 2005, with the European constitutional treaty for the result that we know: the passage by the Congress of the Treaty of Lisbon of 2008.
Due to a lack of industry, France only operates in sectors: mass distribution, construction, tourism and social assistance. With an aging population and young “natives” who are infertile and economically downgraded, only immigration and population growth can support such a system. While construction responds to the shortage of housing and equipment by bringing in cheap labor, peripheral France is being placed in the market of passive consumption, of commodification in everything. Under the European umbrella, the French elites continue the destruction of France: sale of public flagships, advent of the tertiary sector, liberalization of trade and mass immigration.
The Western “trilemma”
For France, as for other nations, we must choose between three solutions in the form of an impasse: massive immigration, economic stagnation or a surge in birth rates. This is the “demographic trilemma” highlighted by a study by two Anglo-Saxon academics, Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington. A concept that can be summarized as follows: we cannot simultaneously combine low fertility, economic growth and ethnic continuity. You have to sacrifice one, and choose two elements from the three. Choose low fertility and economic growth, and you must accept rapid immigration and ethnic change (case of Western European countries); choose low fertility and ethnic continuity (therefore low immigration), and you condemn yourself to economic stagnation (case of Japan); choose economic growth and ethnic continuity, then you need high fertility rates and an assumed pronatalist policy (case of Israel).
Concerning France, it is the first solution which was adapted, despite the various recent declarations. Our political, financial and economic elites talk about reducing immigration, but never mention the taboo of a possible slowdown in economic growth or the revival of the birth rate. Let us think of the regular declarations of the various successive bosses of Medef: “Let us remain an open country, which welcomes new cultures and benefits from crossbreeding”Laurence Parisot (2011); “Refugees are good economic news for our country”Pierre Gattaz (2017); “It’s not the bosses who are massively demanding immigration, it’s the economy (…) by 2050, we would need 3.9 million foreign employees”Patrick Martin (2023).
A serious and tough policy regarding immigration must imperatively include a component on the question of birth rates and reindustrialization. We will not solve this problem with a simple law, but with a total political vision. But to do this, you have to be courageous and visionary.
*Rodolphe Cart is a journalist and essayist. Latest book published: Mélenchon, the sound and the fury: Portraits of a revolutionary (La Nouvelle Librairie, 2025).
