Zolta Győri
December 8, 2025
A pedestrian walks on a footbridge linking the Stade de France and Le Franc Moisin neighbourhood of Saint-Denis, a northern Paris suburb, on March 13, 2024.
Julien De Rosa / AFP
Prime Minister François Bayrou’s presentation of his draft budget for 2026, which requires the French government to find savings of €40 billion, has reignited the heated debate over the exact cost of immigration.
The head of government deliberately avoided the issue of immigration as a possible avenue for reducing government spending. As a centrist, he subscribes, at least officially, to the mantra that no one is allowed to publicly question if they want to maintain their status as a respectable politician: immigration is an opportunity for France and does not weigh on the national economy or public finances.
In her latest interview with Le Parisien, Marine Le Pen attacks this “limiting belief” that demonstrates the blindness of those in power: “We are told that everyone should make an effort, but not immigration? I believe that a country in its current situation cannot legally take in 500,000 people a year. That’s equivalent to five cities the size of Perpignan every year,” she explains.
Recently, former budget minister Éric Woerth insisted that immigration has a “zero cost” for public finances. Like him, proponents of open immigration argue that immigrants “work, pay taxes, consume, and provide healthcare” and remain essential to the vitality of the entire nation, without going into detail about the type of work, the amount of taxes paid, or the level of consumption.
In spring of 2024, the Observatory of Immigration and Demography was already concerned about the blind spot that immigration represented in discussions on public finances, pointing out that the net cost of immigration to public finances was estimated by the OECD and the CEPII (Centre for Prospective Studies and International Information, an organisation attached to the prime minister’s office) at €35 to €40 billion per year—an amount representing one-third of annual income tax revenue and exceeding the total expenditure of the ministry of the interior.
A more detailed analysis provides further clarification, according to figures analysed by analyst Marc Vanguard.
Lâchez ChatGPT. Les faits, c'est que :
— Marc Vanguard (@marc_vanguard) July 16, 2025
👉 L'intégration économique des immigrés extra-européens ET DE LEURS ENFANTS est calamiteuse.
15% de chômage pour les descendants d'immigrés africains, c'est DEUX FOIS plus que pour les Français sans ascendance migratoire. C'est juste… pic.twitter.com/cejn8Vx95i
All indicators point to the destruction of the myth of successful integration and immigration as a source of national wealth, even when it comes to second-generation immigrants. Vanguard focuses on the specific—but numerically significant—case of immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to France. It establishes that immigrants, regardless of their origin, have an unemployment rate nearly twice as high as that of French people without a migrant background (11.5% compared to 6.5%). As for the descendants of African immigrants, their unemployment rate reaches 15%. Critics, always quick to find someone to blame, will point to racism on the part of employers. But there is another indicator to consider: dependence on social assistance, which dramatically perpetuates the low employment rate among immigrants. Social and unemployment benefits represent a share of income for African immigrants that is three times higher than for non-immigrants. African immigrants, therefore, have little incentive to seek long-term employment.
All analyses steeped in emotion and sentiment, extolling the virtues of the ‘good immigrant’ who studies and integrates–always!—fail to take into account the hidden costs of this same miracle immigration: financial costs, but also social and cultural costs, which are less immediately quantifiable but nonetheless very real. For the record, the riots of June 2023—directly linked to immigration—resulted in an estimated cost of €650 million in damage to shops, public buildings, and property. At the beginning of July, the CEO of SCOR, a reinsurance company, explained the unique nature of France today, a nightmare for insurance companies due to the “frequency and severity” of the riots: a situation directly linked to immigration, but which is not presented as such in the media.
Finally, the problem is not one of integration, since figures show that the descendants of European immigrants have an even lower unemployment rate than French people without a migrant background. The problem for public finances is that of immigration, and more specifically, immigration of populations that are originally poor, of low added value, and culturally incompatible with the host country.
The prime minister’s budget proposals are therefore likely to accentuate the terrible sense of disconnect that an ever-increasing proportion of French people feel between their lives and what their leaders understand and extrapolate from their biased analyses. However, as Vanguard, who holds this ‘unpopular’ opinion, points out, substantial savings on “the cost of immigration” cannot be achieved with a wave of a magic wand and with immediate effect. Tackling this issue in order to substantially reduce the burden requires consistency, vision, and a long-term perspective. In the meantime, the refusal of the ruling elites to tackle the cost of immigration is dramatically symbolic. Who will decide to change course?
