French Muslims Emigrate Amid Rising Discrimination, Presidential Campaign Ignores Trend

"It’s really the 2015 attacks that made me leave - I realized we wouldn’t be forgiven," Sabri Louatah, 38, the grandson of Algerian immigrants who settled in Philadelphia, his adopted city, told The New York Times. "When you live in a big Democratic city on the East Coast, you’re more at peace than in Paris, where you’re at the heart of the cauldron." He deplores the hardening of public opinion towards all French Muslims after these attacks. In France, he had been called a "dirty Arab." During the presidential campaign, discrimination against Muslims continues to increase. Valérie Pécresse, the center-right candidate, Éric Zemmour, the far-right candidate... the tone is incisive.

Like Sabri, many French Muslims have left France because of discrimination. "It’s only abroad that I’m French," says Amar Mekrous, 46, who settled in Leicester, England, with his wife and three children after the 2015 attacks. "I’m French, I’m married to a French woman, I speak French and I live French. I love the food, the French culture. But in my country, I’m not French," adds the one who grew up in the Paris suburbs with immigrant parents. With his Facebook group, he has counted the number of French Muslims living in the United Kingdom. There are 2,500 of them.

"The arrivals were numerous before Brexit," he says. They are mainly young families and single mothers who struggled to find a job in France because they wore the veil. Rama Yade, for her part, moved to the United States, where she is director of the Africa hub at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington. For the former Secretary of State for Human Rights, the emphasis that the presidential campaign places on immigration is "the consecration of 20 years of deterioration" of a political culture obsessed with national identity. She also claims to have left her party, of which Valérie Pécresse is currently the candidate in the elections, because it has become "very hostile to anything that did not represent a fantasized version of French identity."

This "brain drain" is far from being a concern for the presidential candidates. Researchers point to France’s failure to guarantee social mobility even for the brightest members of one of its largest minorities. "These people will participate in the economy of countries like Canada and Great Britain," observes Olivier Esteves, professor at the Center for Administrative, Political and Social Studies and Research at the University of Lille, where a survey was conducted among 900 emigrant French Muslims, including in-depth interviews with 130 of them. "France is shooting itself in the foot."