A Nationalist Look at National Rally’s Immigration Policies

Tomorrow, June 30th, 2024, the French will head to the polls to elect a new National Assembly and ultimately a new government. For those who do not know, France is not unilaterally governed by the President. Instead, the Prime Minister of France and the President of France each have an array of powers, some of which are dependent on the other, some of which they exercise unilaterally. Most of the time the President and the Prime Minister are from the same party, but it’s not a given.

As things stand Marine Le Pen’s Nationally Rally (formerly the National Front) is likely to gain a majority of seats. The last polls released just before the pollsters and media go silent for a mandatory “reflection period” show that Madame Le Pen and her protégé, Jordan Bardella, lead handily.

If the National rally takes home a majority of the seats after election day Bardella will become Prime Minister while Le Pen reorients pressuring Macron into calling an early presidential election. She has already taken steps in this direction, challenging the President’s generally understood prerogatives to determine the country’s foreign policy, and military policy, and set budgetary priorities.

Le Pen has risen to the top thanks in large part to social media helping her win over throngs of France’s youth, the majority of whom know that the massive waves of immigration and demographic change are largely to blame for their nation’s woes. From the housing crisis to the cost of living crisis to steep competition for employment, and the state’s budget deficits. All of these issues and more can be linked back to immigration.

As such, National Rally has released a brief manifesto outlining a series of policies and promises to deal with the key issues facing France, and much like with the Reform UK manifesto, immigration takes center stage.

We are going to go over the immigration portion of this manifesto, titled L’Union Fait la France.

The first item of note is in the opening page of the manifesto, where National Rally promises to spend the summer enacting a series of “emergency measures” designed to:

1. Lower the Cost of Living
2. Restablish Security
3. And Halt Immigration

An absolute halt immigration is entirely realistic and could likely be implemented on day one of a National Rally administration. During the COVID-19 Pandemic the french state suspended the insurance of all visas for almost two years. The French state even went so far as to suspend visa issuances for those who already had appointments and had submitted all of their paperwork.

There is no reason a Le Pen dominated French government could not do the same, and even on the same ground concerning health and wellbeing.

The party then goes on to list a series of measures it will take on illegal immigration:

1. Removing any obstacle to expelling foreigners
2. Deportation of criminal illegal aliens
3. Abolition of birthright citizenship
4. Restricting immigrant access to healthcare with access only in emergencies
5. Restriction of family reunification
6. An end to all regulatization of illegal aliens.

Each of these policies is good in their own right, yet some do not go far enough.

Deportation of Criminal Illegal Aliens:

A point of concern is the deportation of only criminal illegal aliens. There are some 700,000 illegal aliens in France, many of whom do not have criminal records. Furthermore, some 21% of the roughly 5.1 million non-European immigrants in France are known to have originally been illegal aliens before receiving regularized status. This amounts to roughly 1.3 million individuals.

If Le Pen only intends to deport a small fraction of criminal illegal aliens she will be missing the chance to deport nearly 1.9 million non-Europeans from France despite the fact current French law would allow the denaturalization of those who received their citizenship through fraud.

Le Pen and her party have voiced support for denaturalizing criminals and fraudsters in the past but no such pledge made it into this manifesto. If Madame Le Pen were to keep her word on this issue she could denaturalize/irregularize nearly 1.1 million people who obtained their French citizenship or residency status despite having arrived in the country illegally.

France has an extremely broad set of regulations and laws which enable the Council of State to denaturalize those who:

1. Undermine the fundamental interest of France
2. Lie or commit fraud in the acquisition of their nationality
3. Interfere with the public administration of France and the individual freedoms of Frenchmen
4. Served in a foreign government’s public or armed services

These options give a nationalist French administration, should one arise in the coming years, ample room to begin denaturalizing those non-Europeans who pose a threat to the state and to begin deporting them back to their ancestral homelands.

Abolition of Birthright Citizenship:

There is not much to say about this step. This policy has the strong endorsement of the French people, with more than 65% of the French telling pollsters they want to see an end to birthright citizenship. This proposals also receives our strong endorsement, the more exclusive and well defined Western nations become the better.

Currently France allows persons born to foreigners in France to claim French nationality once they have turned 18, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.

This means that hundreds of thousands of second-generation immigrants, born to the over 2 million aforementioned immigrants who entered France illegally, have received French nationality as a result of that crime.

An End to All Regulatization of Illegal Aliens:

This ties back to the first point we covered regarding the deportation of illegals.

It is fantastic that National Rally wants to cease regularizing illegal aliens, but without a concrete commitment to ensuring their deportation they are merely leaving a large segment of the non-Western population living in a shadow where they will continue to visit the same mistreatment upon France which they already have.

Le Pen has made ample calls to end healthcare provision, public services, and even the provision of education to illegal immigrants, but has yet, so far as we can tell, to promise to deport this very sizeable population from the country.

Further down in the manifesto the party has another series of policy proposals under the headline “Preserving the French People Against Migratory Submergence”

In this section the party promises to control both illegal and legal immigration through a series of measures:

1. Limiting Schengen’s freedom of movement to European citizens only
2. More harshly prosecuting those who employ illegal aliens
3. Only processing aslyum applications from abroad
4. Make immigration a national priority
5. Rserve family allowance and a range of social benefits to French citizens only

Once again, most of these policy ideas are fantastic. People with a visa to live in Luxembourg or Ireland should not have the freedom to cross into France as they so please, nor should immigrants have access to the French benefits system. But these promises once again come up short.

The party does not specify how it will restrict legal immigration, though presumably through some kind of quota system. In the past Mademe Le Pen has praised other politicians, such as former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, for pledging to get immigration down to “the tens of thousands” a year.

Were Marine Le Pen to get French immigration figures down below 80,000 she could preside over a reversal of immigration trends. Net immigration would drop into the negatives and student, working, and dependent immigrant visa holders would begin dropping as a share of the population at a rate of roughly 100,000 a year.

We did a cursory search through Le Pen’s past statements on immigration, and while she regularly calls for reductions both legal and illegal, she has not spoken in any detail. She has critiqued the French government for issuing hundreds of thousands of visas in a year, but offered little in the way of alternative policy.

None of this is to say that Madame Le Pen and Bardella have no other ideas. They may indeed radically reduce immigration to France, as they have promised, and enact programs to draw down the number of foreigners, denaturalize those who have violated French law, and take other steps to reverse the Great Replacement in France.

But we cannot judge the effects of what they will not say.

Marine Le Pen has much to prove.