Immigration, an Unsolvable Problem? Or Too Useful to Be Solved
Fifty-two years after 1974, France is re-prescribing the same failed remedy. A remedy that has to be re-prescribed is no remedy at all.
“We have reached the limit of our capacity to integrate and assimilate.” In proposing, on 24 May, a three-year moratorium on legal immigration, French Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin believes he is stating a fact. In reality, he is reciting a script half a century old: it was in the name of the very same diagnosis that France “provisionally” suspended labour immigration in July 1974. Fifty-two years later, the remedy is being prescribed again, unchanged. That is the surest sign that it cures nothing: if restrictions worked, the problem would have been solved long ago. And if the state insists on re-prescribing them, it is because admitting their failure would force it to put its own policies on trial.
Gérald Darmanin, French Minister of Justice, at the European Commission, March 2026. Photo: Claudio Centonze / © European Union, 2026 / EC – Audiovisual Service, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The Same Rhetoric, Half a Century Apart
The proposed moratorium comes paired with a suspension of family reunification and with quotas written into the Constitution. President of the National Rally Jordan Bardella, for his part, is promising a referendum on immigration “the moment we come to power.” The aim is openly avowed: to make immigration the central issue of the 2027 presidential election.
In my research on British and French immigration policy from the 1960s to the 1980s, I showed that such rhetoric does not describe a reality: it governs. Narratives of invasion, cultural difference, or economic necessity came before the restrictive measures—the Marcellin-Fontanet circulars of 1972, the suspension of July 1974. Devised to define the problem, they locked immigration policy into a trajectory it has never left. The economic crises themselves did not create these restrictions: they served as technical packaging for choices that had already been made.
The record of this trajectory is a matter of public knowledge: the 1974 suspension, the 10,000-franc repatriation bonus of 1977, the “zero immigration” pledge of 1993, and the long succession of laws catalogued in the official chronology. Each generation of officials promises to turn off the tap; the next finds the problem still there—and proposes to turn it off again. A remedy that has to be re-prescribed is no remedy at all.
Why the State Cannot Admit Failure
Why this obstinacy? First, because restriction is the state’s native instrument: borders, residence permits, service counters, and registries. It is what the state knows how to do; so it is what the state proposes, whatever the result.
Above all, to acknowledge half a century of failure would be a fearsome admission. It would mean more than merely conceding that the state has failed at a mission it had assigned itself. An honest diagnosis would lead one to seek the roots of “failed integration” in other public policies: first, the administrative machinery of so-called “integration”; and then labour-market policy—the regulatory cost of employment, the rigidity of the employment contract, the barriers to entry into many professions—which keeps newcomers on the margins of the labour market and manufactures the very failure later invoked to justify fresh restrictions. To pull on that thread would mean dismantling these policies. The restrictive narrative serves precisely to protect this status quo: as long as the migrant is the problem, the state’s own policies escape scrutiny.
The contradiction bursts open within the state apparatus itself. While one minister proposes a freeze, France Travail counts 2.28 million projected hires for 2026, 43.8% of them deemed hard to fill, and the law of 26 January 2024 created a route to residency through “shortage occupations.” With one hand, the state acknowledges the need for the very workers it proposes to shut out with the other.
Judging Remedies by Their Results
As 2027 approaches, a single discipline ought to govern the debate: judge each proposal by its track record. The moratorium has one. The 1974 suspension did not stop immigration: it transformed it, freezing the back-and-forth and converting a rotating flow of labour migration into permanent family settlement or into irregular immigration. To freeze again would reproduce the same effects—with, as a bonus, sharper inflation in construction and in sectors that depend heavily on low-skilled labour.
The opposite course is well known: legal labour channels tied to employers’ needs, lighter regulatory barriers so that employment—the most powerful instrument of integration there is—can do its work, and a state refocused on what it can actually control. As long as the state would rather restage 1974 than examine its own policies, the “immigration problem” will remain forever unsolvable—it is too useful to be solved.