Éric Zemmour: immigration, retirement, birth rate … his arguments scrutinized – LCI

Not yet an official candidate, he was for the moment “decision”. But continues to present his vision of France. Éric Zemmour was interviewed this Sunday, October 24 by journalists from LCI, RTL and Le Figaro on the subjects that punctuate the campaign, such as purchasing power, taxation or even the retirement age. Enough to get the polemicist out of his comfort zone. This did not prevent him from reiterating certain untruths that he has been defending since the start of this campaign which does not speak its name.

Whether it is the increase in salaries or places in prison, Eric Zemmour has often put his favorite subject on the table: immigration. Thus the one who was definitively convicted in 2011 for “inciting racial discrimination”, proposed to dismiss the “25% foreigners” which populate French prisons in order to resolve the problem of prison overcrowding. A measurement “much simpler” that the construction of new penitentiary establishments, which would allow, according to him, to free “15,000 places”.

These figures are true. According to latest data of the Ministry of Justice, published in July, there were more than 67,900 detainees in the country’s prisons, including nearly 16,720 foreigners. That is 24.6% of men and women behind bars who do not have French nationality. A disproportionate figure compared to the share of foreigners in the French population, which stood at 7.6% in 2020 according to theINSEE.

The finding is therefore final. Foreigners are over-represented behind bars. It remains to know the cause. Is this the result of an alleged sort of predisposition to delinquency among these populations, as the polemicist suggests? Or simply the fruit of the social classes from which some foreigners come, accompanied by “judicial reflexes” towards them ? Difficult to be conclusive on the question. In any case, last January, the International Prison Observatory recalled in analysis that for the same offense, a person born abroad has “three times more likely to be tried in immediate appearance”, “nearly five times more likely to be remanded in custody” and “eight times more likely to be sentenced to prison” than a person of French nationality.

The guest was then asked about purchasing power, which is emerging through polls as the favorite topic of voters. For the polemicist, it is still on the side of immigration that the solutions can be found. If he wants to cut taxes sharply, he believes that this money “we find it” in “removing national solidarity from foreigners”, including people in a regular situation.

To defend this idea that “foreigners cost the community and public finances”, the guest of the Grand Jury advanced two “terrible numbers”. He assured that the inactive on the territory represented 13.4% of the French, against 40% of foreigners outside the European area. Completely wrong figures, as INSEE explained to us in This article. The institute responsible for the production, analysis and publication of official statistics in France indeed noted several errors in the methodology used by Eric Zemmour, who in particular forgets to take into account “retirees and pre-retirees” in his calculations, as well as those in training.

By following the right methodology, the reality is quite different. The institute explained to us that if the level of inactivity of foreigners outside the European Union is indeed 38.4%, that of French nationals is 28.5%. This is twice the figure advanced by the sovereignist. A gap which also proves that if non-European people are more unemployed than those of French nationality, this phenomenon is rebalanced by the fact that this foreign population is younger, outside the university course and very far from the age of retirement.

This is why it is also misleading to declare, as Eric Zemmour did, that “half of those who receive pensions were born abroad”. This false information is the result of a misinterpretation of the report of the Court of Auditors of September 2020. In its pages, the financial court cited government figures on the number of people born abroad and registered with social security. It then reported 12.4 million people born abroad – including French people born outside France – and in possession of a number to receive social benefits. Of these, 62% had an “open right” to retirement benefits, or 7.7 million people. A figure that some representatives of the extreme right compared to the 14.5 million retirees in the country to conclude that half of them were therefore foreigners.

However, as the National Old Age Insurance Fund (Cnav) explained in the past, it is wrong to think that this figure corresponds to a number of retirees receiving a certain amount of money each month. This also takes into account duplicates and people with rights, but without collecting them. Moreover, the Court of Auditors wrote in black and white in its report that “for family and retirement benefits, it was the payment of benefits, active or suspended.”

According to the organization, interviewed by Checknews , there are in reality only 2.6 million people born abroad and effectively receiving pension rights, including some French. Or 18% of the total.

The answer to the problem of financing pensions passes, as the journalists of the Grand Jury have pointed out, through a demographic issue. So, without immigration, how to rejuvenate the population? Again, Eric Zemmour responds with a tackle. This time he attacks François Hollande and the “Socialists” who have “dog-eared” the birth rate policy, through the modulation of family allowances according to income. Proof according to him, the birth rate “began to decline under this five-year term”. It’s wrong. According to the figures of INSEE, births in France have been declining since 2010. This is a phenomenon that began under the five-year term of Nicolas Sarkozy.

On the other hand, what has actually started to fall under the mandate of François Hollande is the fertility rate. This indicator makes it possible to know the number of children born per woman of childbearing age. However, this fall would have deeper causes than the government’s family policy alone, according to several experts interviewed at the time by the press. Thus, according to the OECD economist Olivier Thévenon cited by The Parisian, this slight drop is more of a delayed reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. “While fertility fell in OECD countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, it was maintained in France, due to the reassuring framework offered by the family policy.“, thus recalled the economist. Until the Hexagon also bears the cost of an economy which was struggling to revive.

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