In an interview with the American broadcaster CBS, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen rejected the attempted multicultural framing of the issue of immigration in France and defended the need for mass deportations.
Speaking with Blairite bureaucrat turned journalist Trevor Phillips for the once prestigious 60 Minutes news programme, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen said that migrants who fail to adopt French culture or contribute economically should not be permitted to stay and drain the nation of its resources and create divisions.
“When you take in too many immigrants, you create the conditions for destabilising your society. And that is what has happened in France,” she told the UK Guyanese-heritage interviewer. “There is another problem: a problem of numbers. The unemployment rate among foreigners in France is twice the unemployment rate among French citizens. We can no longer import unemployed people.”
Pressed by Phillips whether this was a result of “discrimination” against immigrant communities, Le Pen forcefully rejected the woke framing: “No, that doesn’t exist. You’re not going to import those ideas here.”
“There is no discrimination in France, sir. It’s not true. And I’ll go even further: it’s the least racist,” she declared.
The National Rally leader stressed the importance of migrants assimilating into French culture, rather than allowing multiculturalism to divide society.
“We believe someone who comes to immigrate to our country must blend into the national community. You have something more like a layered cake: each community can live alongside the others while keeping its own customs. That is not how we see things,” Le Pen explained.
Asked whether she would therefore enact a policy of remigration, she said: ” If someone comes and says, ‘I hate you, I despise your culture, I don’t want to respect your laws,’ well, we say to him, ‘Listen, sir, the door is wide open. And we might even, for that matter, force you to leave.”
