September 3, 2026. By Socrates George Kazolias

This is sure to get me denounced as a right-wing extremist, ‘Islamophobe,’ and ‘Identitarian,’ and whatever else those who would like to save France from cultural nihilism, voire cultural annihilation, are called these days. But reality will always slap you in the face, (or bite you in the ass)…eventually.

When the Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, not only praised the presence of illegal migrants, but also seemed to support the illicit employment of undocumented foreigners in France, it is not surprising that more and more French voters are turning to the anti immigrant hard right.

Immigration and the real or perceived threats to security, and French finances, along with what voters think it means to be French, will ride high in how voters cast their ballots in next year’s all important elections.

There are so many things wrong with what Emmanuel Grégoire said that it merits being taken apart piece by piece.

But first let’s look at his statement in Le Parisien newspaper August 28, 2026 (my translation):

“The truth is that the country could not run without the undocumented. This country doesn’t know how to care for its elders, does not know how to run its health system, its construction industry and probably its agriculture without this labor. We should thank them first before spitting in their faces.” –Emmanuel Grégoire.

What Grégoire says undocumented migrants do is true. It is also against the law and destabilizing.

When Numbers don’t Lie, Hide the Numbers

Firstly, nations have laws on who can come into a country, what procedures must be followed, how long they can come for, and for which reasons, because its citizens and economy need to be protected. Laws are there to be enforced. If the advocates for open borders think everybody should be let in, or that those who came illegally should automatically be given papers, then they should change the laws.

That a leading politician apparently encourages breaking immigration laws seems to me to be a scandal in and of itself. But given the number of homeless in Paris grew by 10% this past year, and the discontent among the French inhabitants, it is also a recipe for unrest (more on this below).

Grégoire wants to create another 4,000 accommodations to house the homeless migrants at the tax-payer’s expense. Paris debt will reach 9.7 billion euros this year, or 4,400 euros per inhabitant  (many put the city’s debt at 12 billion). The cost of illegal immigration is weighing heavily on the social safety net, infrastructure and civil peace.

There are an estimated 700,000 illegal migrants in France. It is not known how many there are in Paris but statistics range for 20,000 to 100,000.

In November 2022, the Paris Prefect of Police, Laurent Nunez, said that when it comes to criminality, “36% of the individuals implicated in the Paris metropolitan area are foreign nationals.”

Nunez added, that at the time: “They also figure in one out of every two burglaries, one out of every two violent robberies, 40% of sexual assaults, (…) and in the case of pickpocketing—in nearly eight or nine out of ten incidents.”

Obviously, French inhabitants are worried over questions of security, as well as the financial burden on the country.

It is all well and good to want to help others, but to quote then Prime Minister Michel Rocard who said in 1989, “We cannot shoulder the burden of all the world’s misery.”

Grégoire Praises Illegal Employment

It is illegal in France to employ undocumented, non-registered, and non tax-paying migrants. Yet, low paying, manual labor jobs are full of them. The problem is that it is not only the illegality of the act, but the fact that this labor is used to keep wages down at extremely exploitive levels.

In the 1970s, the French Communist Party opposed massive immigration of cheap labor for this very reason. In January 1981, around the time the flood gates were opened, Communist Party Leader, George Marchais, said: “We must stop both official and clandestine immigration.”¹

With 2.7 million unemployed in France, 8.3% of the population, it seems to this writer that there is a labor pool big enough to fill the gap being occupied by illegal labor. A number of things can be done to get people to work and the first might be, raise wages.

In many zones inhabited by high concentrations of those with recent migrant background, youth unemployment can be as high as 45% to 50%.

I am the first to decry the scandalous distribution of wealth to the top and I advocate for a greater distribution of wealth to those who produce it. This will increase tax revenues and get people off of France’s very generous, but unsustainable, welfare safety nets, which eat up 57% of the French budget (health, unemployment, family allotments, housing allotments, monthly ‘minimum insertion’ welfare checks, etc.)

There is a large marge of manoeuvre without totally dispossessing the rich and driving them out of the country. The wealthiest 10% of households own nearly half of French wealth while the least wealthy 50% own only 7.2%. ²The rich can be asked to make a bigger contribution and share the wealth created more than at present. At the same time efforts have to be made to get more people to want to work.

Yes, people may have to accept to pay more for certain products and services and do with less if France is to manage its budget and continue to borrow on the markets.

France’s debt is untenable. It is 116% of the country’s GDP (nearly 3.5 trillion euros) and the payment on interest alone in 2026 will be 74 billion euros, which is money that the country doesn’t have. Cuts must be made and the social safety nets risk being first in line, (although this writer would prefer France reduce defense spending, and cut aid to Ukraine and Israel).

How can you claim to be a leftist humanist, support slave-wage labor, favour breaking the law and encourage massive immigration knowing that the country’s finances are heavily stressed and the social fabric is ripping apart? Is this how Grégoire expects to stop the anti immigrant right from getting elected next year?

Clash of Civilisations

Grégoire says “the problem is not immigration but integration.” Since the recent waves of immigration began around 1980, France has done much to integrate those who came from Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. All those efforts have not worked.

In previous generations, the word was assimilation. Immigrants, mostly from Christian European countries, were to become wholly French in a generation, with the public school system acting as a major catalyst. And it worked.

As the recent wave of immigrants showed great difficulty in adapting, even a refusal to leave their old ways, France tried lowering school quality thinking that if everybody got the Baccalaureate, they would feel more French. The Ministry of Education will deny this but studies show the presence of migrant children has lowered the standards. This produced high school students with diplomas who could barely read and couldn’t write. In previous generations, the less scholastic minded would have followed more professional or vocational tracts,

France invested heavily in association activities in communities with a high density of migrant background youth which often ended up forming enclaves of separatist minded islamists who reject the country they were born in.

Successive French governments tried to favor what the Germans call ‘Multi-Kulti,’ à l’anglaise, and ended up with a clash of cultures that have led many Europeans to accept Samuel Huntington’s earlier much disputed ‘Clash of Civilisations.’ Not only right wing politicians, but also Military and Police leadership as well as Scholars are now openly talking of impending social strife and even civil war in several European countries with high rates of unassimilated migrants and their offspring. 

Reports of ‘no-go zones’ where the cités are run and dominated by Islamist militants, criminal gangs, and under a foreign, imported culture are widespread today. Many French voters fear they are losing their ‘identity’ and their culture, not to mention their country.

Even politicians on the Left today are repeating things said by National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the 1980s and 1990s and for which he was condemned for inciting to racial hatred.

It is probably too late to avoid confrontations. One case in point is the Islamist headscarf which became a topic in 1989 when schoolgirls began wearing it. Back then, the left accused those who wanted to ban it of intolerance and racism. Today, there’s a law against wearing it in public buildings and there is talk of banning it altogether.

There are those on the Left, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon of hard the left Les Insoumis, who are in favor of the “creolization of France.” But to most, including this writer, it looks more like a hostile take over bid by a foreign, antagonistic, and retrograde religious culture.

That Emmanuel Grégoire believes his statements can calm ‘les esprits’ rather than throw oil on the fire is beyond my comprehension.

The Solution is not more Immigration

Of course, it is sad to see how miserable the people are in the countries these migrants come from. We can be worried that they are mostly of fighting age, young males. But how is collapsing the host countries which provide much aid to their nations of origin the solution?

Yes, Europe has a lot of blood on its hands from colonialism and post-colonial exploitation. But the countries of origin have been independent now much longer than they were colonized. Sure, more must be done to help them develop. Accepting their unskilled, poorly educated, and unadaptable, youth is not going to help.

Emmanuel Grégoire should be roundly condemned for promoting acts of illegality and throwing oil on the tinderbox which is France today.³

1. None of those leftists I have talked to who favor regularizing illegal migrants or opening the borders have said they want to live under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They are happy with a capitalist welfare state but want the wealthy to pay without asking themselves what happens if the rich up and leave. ↩︎
2. Mais la concentration est beaucoup plus forte en haut
   La répartition de la masse totale du patrimoine brut est particulièrement inégale :
   50 % les plus riches : 92,8 % du patrimoine
   30 % les plus riches : 77,6 %
   20 % les plus riches : 65,6 %
   10 % les plus riches : 47,9 %
   5 % les plus riches : 34,2 %
   1 % les plus riches : 15,4 %
   Donc, en simplifiant :
   Les 10 % de ménages les plus riches possèdent presque la moitié (48 %) du patrimoine français, tandis que les 50 % les moins riches n’en possèdent qu’environ 7,2 %. ↩︎
3. I am not a citizen of the world. I am the product of Greco-Roman civilization and European Judaeo-Christian heritage and very attached to French culture. Although the values I was taught as a child in my Anglo-Saxon Puritan upbringing were lies my country of birth never respected, I still hold those values dear and true. It is those values which have led me to fight my whole life against Empire. France is a country where the people have always been in the forefront of the fight for Justice despite France’s many failures to live up to the ideal of 1789. We have had setbacks and there is much more struggling to do but we are miles ahead of the United States which once pretended to be the light on the hill. ↩︎