French leaders know how to manipulate their voters, but the voters are also apparently easily manipulated. Every leader from French President Emmanuel Macron to François Mitterrand in the 1980s has decried immigration numbers and promised a crackdown, all while allowing immigration numbers to continuously climb year after year.
Here are just some relevant quotes:
Emmanuel Macron said in 2023: “There is an immigration problem in France.”
In 2016, then French President François Hollande said, “There are too many arrivals, immigration that shouldn’t be there.”
In 2023, then leader Nicolas Sarkozy said: “There are too many immigrants in France.”
In 1991, former leader Jacques Chirac said, “We must stop family reunification. We must completely revise the right of asylum. We must open the debate on the right of all foreigners to social benefits.”
In 1989, the famous leader François Mitterrand said, “On immigration matters, we have crossed the tolerance threshold.”
The age-old adage is that “nobody voted for this.”
It is true that the specific question of mass immigration never came to a referendum, but it is also fair to say that some very pro-migrant candidates, such as Macron, have continuously made it into office.
Still, one would assume that in a democratic system, with leader after leader calling for a halt to immigration, that immigration levels would tend to trend lower. However, this is not how Western democracy has worked over the last decades. The same developments have been seen in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. Leaders know the masses are unhappy about immigration, so they make proclamations against immigration to placate the masses, all while actual policy serves an entirely different purpose.
Macron is arguably the worst offender the French have ever seen when it comes to migration. In 2023, he said France must reduce immigration, beginning with legal entrants in a wide-ranging interview with weekly political magazine Le Point. Macron’s remark comes after he said in 2022 that migration “is part of France’s DNA” and oversaw a record increase in immigrants in 2022.
What has his record been since then?
Well, Macron was lying, as this chart clearly shows:
The foreign population has soared year after year, reaching record after record. In 2025, a record number of first-time legal residence permits were issued, totaling 384,000. In short, France is being buried in a wave of mass immigration that only a minority of French actually wanted. The estimates of how many foreigners are now living in France varies wildly, with some figures going as high as 9 million. However, there are also millions of legal French citizens who also have a migration background, which has led to a massive demographic shift.
Poll after poll has shown the French are remarkably opposed to mass immigration.
In a CSA poll for CNews in 2023, 64 percent of French said “we should stop non-European immigration to France.”
In a CSA poll for Europe 1 in 2024, 48 percent of French people said they wanted zero immigrants coming to the country, including 53 percent of women respondents.
In an Ifop poll in 2026, 60 percent of French people said they believe France is witnessing “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations, mainly from the African continent.”
In a poll from Odoxa-Backbone Consulting for Le Figaro in 2023, 74 percent of French said they believe there are too many migrants in France and 72 percent said they want a referendum on immigration.
In a CSA poll for CNews in 2023, 80 percent of French said they support a total ban on more immigration.
Meanwhile, in communist China, where there is not even an illusion of a democratic vote, foreigners only make up 0.06 percent of the population of 1.4 billion people. It may be hard to believe for many, but there are now fewer foreigners in all of China, at 845,000, than there are in just one European city, Berlin.
The political leaders that have governed the West have lied every step of the way on immigration, and in the process, they have gravely imperiled democracy. Many looking to authoritarian China see a country on the rise, where high-speed trains and critical infrastructure are quickly and efficiently erected, where crime is low, and social cohesion generally high.
Meanwhile, Europe is throwing up protectionist barriers against China at a time when China is pulling ahead in green energy, automobile manufacturing, machine tools, and AI.
Mass immigration has been an unmitigated economic, educational, security, and budget disaster for the West.
Democracy itself should not necessarily be condemned, however. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, all thriving democracies, have managed to keep their borders almost entirely closed to mass immigration while growing their economies, all based on the will of the people.
In the end, it may have something to do with Europeans themselves and their culture of guilt, self-righteousness, and virtue signaling, which are attitudes that tend to dominate amongst European populations. The trend has been remarkably uniform across the Western world. It is not only France, but also the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, all marching in lockstep. While we can point our fingers at the mass media and academia, we also have to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask how we collectively allowed this to happen.