Long read

Without Them, France Grinds to a Halt

A young man shot dead in Trappes because he was Black. Students beaten outside their university. Far-right activists charging marches while the police look on. And, in the background, the same refrain: immigrants cost France too much. Meanwhile, the country borrows at higher rates than Italy. The public figures tell a very different story.

By the LesMRE newsroom30 October 202617 min read

Without Them, France Grinds to a Halt — © LesMRE

Trappes, on a Friday morning

He was 26. Pengo Bossio Wangi, a French citizen of Congolese origin (Democratic Republic of the Congo), was shot dead on Friday 23 October 2026 by a motorist who was driving around Trappes and La Verrière, in the Yvelines. Seven other people were wounded, several of them of African or North African origin. One of them was taken to hospital in a life-threatening condition.

The gunman, Kévin T., 39, was placed under formal investigation on 29 October by an anti-terrorism judge for premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder, with racism as an aggravating circumstance. Questioned by investigators, he admitted to targeting people he perceived as Muslim, African or North African. He says he chose Trappes because he saw it as a lair of Islamists, and considers his act justified¹.

In his booby-trapped apartment in Plaisir, investigators found weapon components, a copy of Mein Kampf and hundreds of stickers he had designed himself. Thirty of them proclaimed his support for the Rassemblement national (National Rally, RN). No organisational link to the party has been established. But according to the lawyer of a man hit by two bullets in the legs, the RN supplied him with “ideological ammunition.”

France had already known this. In late May 2025, in Puget-sur-Argens, in the Var, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian hairdresser, fell to the bullets of his neighbour. The interior minister at the time called it “clearly a racist crime”².

In Lille, on 14 October, Paul, 19, had come to join the blockade of his school, outside the Catholic University. He had no time to understand: a kick to the chest, then more. “I have a footprint on my forehead,” the student says. The attack was claimed by La Cocarde lilloise and Génération Zemmour (the youth movement associated with Éric Zemmour), and prosecutors opened an investigation for violence committed by a group. In Paris, on 9 and 13 October, several dozen individuals attacked students who were blocking the Panthéon-Assas university, throwing bottles at them. According to StreetPress, they belong to a group descended from the far-right student organisation GUD, dissolved in 2024³.

On 24 October, a day of mobilisation against the cost of living, the scene was repeated in more than a dozen cities. Mediapart gathered the anger of mayors who question the passivity of the security forces⁴. In Rouen, images from Blast show demonstrators being beaten by identitarian activists: when the police arrive, it is the demonstrators they check, while their attackers walk away free. In Nancy, videos show a hooded far-right group charging the march, then falling back behind a line of gendarmes who go on to advance towards the demonstrators. Prosecutors have opened two investigations, one of them handed to the police ethics unit. In Nice, the prefecture speaks of about a hundred masked far-right activists, and eleven suspects linked to that movement are placed in custody⁵.

The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, denies any police protection. His ministry nonetheless acknowledges that these activists “have not been systematically arrested”⁶, and the minister has asked the prefects concerned to refer the matter to the courts. Police unions insist that the police do not take sides. Organised collusion remains to be proven. Impunity, for its part, can be seen on film.

Behind these blows, the same story runs on a loop: immigrants and their children supposedly cost too much and take without giving anything back. That story can be checked against the public figures.

“They cost us a fortune”: the great accounting lie

The phrase comes up everywhere, at the café counter as on television talk shows. According to a 2024 Ifop poll, nearly three-quarters of French people are convinced of it. Yet the economists who measure what immigrants pay to the state and what they receive from it all reach the same conclusion: their effect on public finances is close to zero.

An aircraft carrier does not cost one euro more because a Malian bricklayer lives in Montreuil.

The reference study in France followed thirty years of public accounts, from 1979 to 2011. The economists Xavier Chojnicki, Lionel Ragot and Ndeye-Penda Sokhna show in it that the net contribution of immigrants has always oscillated between -0.5% and +0.05% of GDP, and that it has never determined the size of the deficit⁷. The latest estimate, for 2017, comes to -0.1% of GDP, or about 2.4 billion euros: an amount of the same order as the margin of error of this kind of calculation⁸.

The OECD, which compared 25 countries, reaches the same result. In France, between 2006 and 2018, immigrants brought the public purse the equivalent of 1.02% of GDP a year. The balance turns negative (-0.85%) only if they are charged with a share of spending on the army, research or the running of the state⁹. That spending would exist anyway: an aircraft carrier does not cost one euro more because a Malian bricklayer lives in Montreuil.

Where, then, do the dizzying figures brandished in the National Assembly and on social media come from? According to Xavier Chojnicki, from questionable calculation choices: counting as immigrants children who were born in France, and are therefore French, or arbitrarily attributing a share of crime to immigration. And above all, from forgetting the essential point: immigrants are overwhelmingly aged 25 to 54, the age at which people work and pay the most contributions.

Those who open France before dawn

Before the offices open, someone has cleaned them. Before elderly people have their breakfast, someone has come by to get them up and wash them. Before the restaurant serves its first customer, someone has peeled the vegetables in the kitchen. That someone, very often, was born on the other side of the Mediterranean or the Sahara.

Immigrants make up about one worker in ten in France. But according to the Labour Ministry, they hold nearly 39% of domestic jobs, 28% of security guard posts, 27% of unskilled structural construction jobs and 22% of cook posts¹⁰.

In the Île-de-France region, the dependence is total. More than six home care aides and domestic workers in ten are immigrants, as are nearly one cleaner in two¹¹. In spring 2020, nearly a third of those who were applauded at windows during the lockdown were, in the region, immigrants. The CEPII (a French research centre on the international economy) notes that some essential occupations depend heavily on them, right up to hospital doctors¹².

These jobs are hard, poorly paid and often at unsocial hours. Many of those who do them are graduates who have never been able to put their skills to use. They steal no one’s job: they hold posts that the country can no longer fill any other way.

A France without them

On social media, the word has become commonplace: “remigration.” Behind it lies a simple idea, sending foreigners back “home.” Who would really leave? In 2025, according to the Insee, France’s national statistics institute, 6.3 million foreigners live in France, or 9.1% of the population. One million of them were born here. Immigrants, for their part, number 8 million, of whom 2.6 million have already become French¹³.

“Remigration” would not send foreigners back: it would separate mothers from their children.

The first shock would be demographic. In 2025, France recorded 645,000 births and 651,000 deaths. For the first time since the Second World War, more people die in the country than are born in it, and its population now grows only thanks to immigration¹⁴. Without it, France would start shrinking today.

The second shock would hit pensions. Immigrant men have an activity rate of 80%, higher than non-immigrants (78%). Their departure would empty the age groups that pay contributions, in a country where more than one person in five is already 65 or older.

The third shock would be intimate. People living in France who are children of immigrants number 7.5 million. A third of those under 60 have at least one parent or grandparent born abroad, and nearly one child in four under 5 has an immigrant parent. “Remigration” would not send foreigners back: it would separate mothers from their children, grandparents from their grandchildren, within French families.

And what if Africa sent the French back?

The project has a flip side that its promoters never mention: reciprocity. If France drives out Africans and Arabs, what would stop Rabat, Dakar or Abu Dhabi from returning the favour?

At the end of 2025, about 340,000 French citizens were registered with consulates in Africa and in the Arab countries, excluding Israel. Since registration is optional, the real figure is much higher. The ministry estimates the number of French people living abroad at 2.5 to 3.2 million, against 1.78 million registered¹⁵. Applied to these regions, that ratio puts their number between 470,000 and 600,000 people, children included. Morocco alone is home to 58,016 registered French citizens, and the United Arab Emirates 33,438.

These French citizens are executives, engineers, sales staff and business owners. They are the ones who sell “made in France” on the spot. And that is precisely where France earns money.

In 2025, France ran a trade deficit of 69.2 billion euros¹⁶. The Near and Middle East is an exception: it is one of the few regions with which France still runs a surplus, a historic record of 11.4 billion euros. Some 13,700 French companies exported there that year¹⁷.

In 2025, the Emirates became France’s second-largest trade surplus in the world: 8.5 billion euros, almost double the previous year¹⁸. In Africa, Senegal (978 million euros) and Egypt (637 million) are its two biggest surpluses¹⁹. Morocco is its leading African customer: France sold it 7.4 billion euros of goods in 2024²⁰, and more than 1,100 French subsidiaries are established there, including nearly all of the CAC 40 companies.

With the African continent taken as a whole, France buys more than it sells: a deficit of 6.5 billion euros in 2024. In other words, Africa is also a supplier that the French economy cannot do without.

For France, the bill would be twofold. It would lose the markets that offset part of its deficit, just as its debt is breaking records. And it would see hundreds of thousands of nationals come back without jobs, in a country where unemployment already affects 7% of the non-immigrant working population. A historical irony: a large share of the French in the Maghreb hold dual nationality, exactly the profile that “remigration” claims to drive out.

Debt, the subject no one raises

While the television studios debate foreigners, France’s accounts are sinking. At the end of June 2026, public debt stood at 119.1% of GDP, up 3.7 points in a year. Only Greece (140.8%) and Italy (139.9%) do worse in the European Union. Spain, long pointed at, is at 101.4%²¹.

The markets, for their part, have already ruled. On 21 October 2026, France borrowed over ten years at 5.01%, a level not seen since 2002. It now pays markedly more than Italy (4.57%) and Spain (4.07%), the countries that until recently were presented as the weak links of the eurozone²². The rating agency Moody’s, which has France’s rating on negative outlook, was about to review it.

The orders of magnitude speak for themselves. In 2025, the public deficit stood at 5.1% of GDP, according to the Insee²³. The budget balance of immigration is estimated at -0.1% of GDP: fifty times smaller. Even on the OECD’s harshest assumption, it would weigh six times less than the deficit. Driving out millions of workers would not fill this chasm. It would deprive an ageing country of those who pay contributions.

A debate under influence

How did a subject that weighs 0.1% of GDP end up taking up more room than debt in public debate? Part of the answer lies in the French media landscape.

On 15 June 2026, the Arcom, the audiovisual regulator, served formal notice on CNews, the channel of Vincent Bolloré’s group. After watching 168 hours of its main programmes, the authority found that a single current of thought dominated on security, the war in Ukraine, immigration and Islam. Its president, Martin Ajdari, noted a strong convergence of viewpoints on the main themes covered²⁴. The channel disputes these complaints.

This is not an isolated misstep. According to a count by Le Monde, CNews has received at least 61 warnings or sanctions since it was taken over by the Bolloré group in 2017, making it the most sanctioned channel in the country²⁵. The same industrialist controls Europe 1, the JDD and JDNews²⁶.

There is nothing clandestine in this: the line is openly claimed, and each channel remains free to choose its subjects. But four national media outlets answer to the same shareholder. And the regulator found, in black and white, that on immigration a single voice drowned out all the others.

Françafrique: the other bill

Africans in France are blamed for what they supposedly cost. Much less is said about what France has drawn from Africa, or about the governments it has protected or overthrown there.

The archives, however, are clear. In the wake of Cameroon’s independence, the French army backed President Ahidjo against the guerrilla forces of the Union des populations du Cameroun. In 1964, in Gabon, it swiftly restored Léon M’ba to power after a coup. In 1979, Operations Caban and Barracuda toppled Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Republic²⁷. The defence agreements signed at the time of independence authorised Paris to intervene for the “internal defence” of its allies: in other words, to protect friendly regimes against their own population.

In Rwanda, the commission of historians chaired by Vincent Duclert delivered its conclusions on 26 March 2021. It ruled out complicity in the legal sense, but established “heavy and overwhelming responsibilities” on the part of France, which backed a racist regime to the end despite warnings. The genocide of the Tutsi killed between 800,000 and one million people in 1994²⁸.

Then there is the CFA franc. For decades, the central banks of the franc zone had to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves in an account with the French Treasury, in exchange for a convertibility guarantee. West Africa freed itself from this with the 2019-2020 reform. The CEMAC zone in Central Africa (the Central African Economic and Monetary Community) is still subject to it²⁹. These deposits earn interest, and one cannot speak of theft in the strict sense. But six sovereign states still keep half of their foreign currency with their former colonial power: it is a question of sovereignty, not of accounting.

Colonisation, a memory finally leaving the archives

For more than sixty years, the word “war” remained absent from official French discourse on Cameroon. It took until January 2025 and the report of a commission of fourteen French and Cameroonian historians, chaired by Karine Ramondy. More than a thousand pages, based on declassified archives and testimonies. They describe a genuine war of decolonisation between 1945 and 1971, regroupment camps, the use of incendiary munitions, and a death toll counted “more probably” in the tens of thousands³⁰.

On 12 August 2025, a letter from Emmanuel Macron to Paul Biya was made public. In it, the French president acknowledges that the colonial authorities and the French army carried out repressive violence of many kinds, and that the war continued after the independence of 1960 with Paris’s support³¹.

Colonisation also emptied Africa of part of its memory. In 2018, the historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr counted at least 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in French public collections. The Quai Branly museum alone holds 70,000 of them, 46,000 of which arrived between 1885 and 1960. Among them is a mask from the Ségou region of Mali, bought for 7 francs in 1931, “the equivalent of a dozen eggs”³². To date, restitutions remain rare, voted through one at a time.

What their opponents say

Supporters of a tougher migration policy do not lack arguments, and some of them rest on real facts.

They first put forward much higher cost figures. The Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie (OID), a think tank classed as right-wing, estimates the cost of immigration in 2025 at 3.4% of GDP, or about 100 billion euros a year. RN MP Jordan Guitton repeated this figure in the National Assembly chamber³³. The Fondation Jean-Jaurès, close to the Socialist Party, challenges the method: the OID, it says, applies old ratios to current GDP and widens the population studied well beyond immigrants alone³⁴.

They then point to very real employment gaps. Unemployment affects 12 to 13% of immigrants, against 7% of non-immigrants. Only 54% of immigrant women are in work, against 69% of other women. Among immigrants who arrived from Africa in 2024, only a quarter were working shortly after arrival, another quarter being students¹³. Some see in this proof of a failure of integration and of hiring discrimination, others an argument for reducing arrivals.

They also point out that, even for researchers, the budget balance of immigration remains slightly negative once all collective spending is apportioned. On history, finally, they stress that the Duclert commission ruled out complicity in genocide in the legal sense, and that the CFA franc has given the countries of the zone low inflation and a monetary stability that their neighbours envy.

These disagreements belong to democratic debate. One can want more or less immigration, defend or oppose the CFA franc, read colonial history differently. But none of these arguments justifies shooting at passers-by in Trappes or striking a student in the face in Lille. Pengo Bossio Wangi was 26. He was French.