Macron Addresses France’s Integration Challenges Amid Immigration Debate

"We very clearly have a problem with integration" in France, Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with Le Figaro Magazine during his trip to New Caledonia in late July, as reported by Le Parisien, calling for "not to confuse immigration and integration."

Returning to the wave of violence that engulfed several suburban cities after the death of Nahel, 17, shot dead at the end of June during a police check in Nanterre, the French president said that "these riots are not a subject of current immigration. It is a broader subject of difficulties in certain cities, of socio-economic difficulties, of integration difficulties in some cases and of the functioning of democracy in the age of social networks."

Unlike his Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, who attributed these troubles to young people from immigrant backgrounds, the Head of State was more diplomatic. "When we look at things lucidly, 90% of the people arrested are French. After that, we don’t have ethnic statistics in our country. There are French people from immigration, others who are not from immigration," he clarified.

And he added: "We have always been a country of immigration and we will continue to be so." Emmanuel Macron also highlighted his "population policy." "Many people say No, we, we don’t want to see new arrivals with us. I think we integrate all the better that we do it in a diffuse way. If you put all the Ukrainian families who are arriving in the same places, you don’t integrate them," he points out.