Robert and Emmanuelle Ménard on Immigration, Part 2

The following video is a follow-up to the one we posted on Sunday. It’s a continuation of a TV panel discussion about immigration featuring Robert Ménard (the mayor of Béziers in southern France) and his wife Emmanuelle (a member of the Chamber of Deputies).

Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

07:49   Let’s talk about immigration, since it’s an important problem.
07:53   The migrants and immigration in general are at this point an IDEOLOGICAL subject in France.
07:57   It’s a very important subject for the French people. We see it in poll after poll.
08:00   It’s been dozens of years that people been fighting,
08:03   that French people have fought on this subject. And we don’t manage. There are
08:06   Anglo-Saxon countries, a lot of them, that have solved this problem without being this passionate!
08:09   New Zealand, Australia, Canada,
08:13   who have, each and every one of them, a policy…
08:17   But not the USA! —Except for the UK and the USA. —Ah, yes, I agree. Wouldn’t there be a way
08:21   of talking about this subject in a dispassionate way? Because, after all,
08:25   Australia, and Canada have 25 or 30 percent of their population, [who]
08:29   weren’t born in Australia or Canada! Those are immigration territories! But those are
08:33   immigration territories who manage to talk about immigration in a dispassionate way!
08:38   How do they do it? And why is it always a universal battle in France?
08:41   After all, France is a migration territory! We can assume it! Whether for or against, for limiting
08:45   it or not, we can say that anyway, France is, today, a migration territory! —So how do they do it
08:50   in Australia? —Robert, do you agree? Do you agree that we are an immigration territory?
08:53   Not the way it is today! Eric Brunet, but it is, globally, the fault of the media.
08:57   It’s always the media’s fault! —No, no, no, wait, I’m talking about…
09:01   I’ve been a journalist for 35 years… —Exactly! For that reason, honestly!. the discourse that is
09:06   being held in the media. I’m sorry. 76 percent of French people were against
09:10   accepting Aquarius [the migrant boat]. Immigration is
09:14   the most CONSENSUAL subject in France. THE MOST CONSENSUAL!
09:18   Massively, people in my town, who don’t vote for me, who vote for, I don’t know, for Mélenchon
09:22   I know people who vote for Mélenchon [communist], and who say: “Yes, but we agree with you
09:25   concerning immigration.” 30 percent of his voters are for ending immigration. —And why is it
09:31   the journalists’ fault? —Because, because there is a TRUE gap —I’m surprised when you say that,
09:35   because in a previous life you defended journalists, and now “it’s their fault”. And the minute you
09:39   say, “It’s journalists’ fault”… because journalists are saints… —No, but I wanted to understand why
09:42   saints, who cannot be criticized. —No: why? —I think that
09:46   the media is A MILLION light years [away] from this country.
09:50   From the reality of this country. I think so. I think, that from one TV show to another TV show
09:54   you see people increasingly disconnected from what is…
09:58   I would suggest that all three of you visit in Béziers, my town, some neighborhoods…
10:02   I already did! —And try to explain to the people that immigration
10:06   isn’t their problem. In the staircases, Madame,
10:10   in the neighborhood where I was growing up, in MY neighborhoods — I keep saying it —
10:14   in the staircases we separate the Maghrebin families, Turkish families, gypsy families…
10:18   Who is “we”? —People from the office, not me! The gypsy families, because they cannot…
10:21   the offices of HLM [French Projects]. They’re doing it throughout France, not only in my town.
10:24   They don’t tell you, because you can’t say it, because it’s painful to say —[there is] in fact
10:28   communitarism [tribalism] in the Projects. —Why do they [the Project authorities] do that?
10:31   Because people don’t want to live together — because people don’t want to “coexist”.
10:35   They don’t want to “coexist”. They don’t want to live together. “Coexist” is sort of an INVENTION
10:39   of the TV studio. Nobody wants to coexist.
10:43   Not only of the TV studio, but also politicians. —I agree thousand times. It’s the same thing.
 

4 thoughts on “Robert and Emmanuelle Ménard on Immigration, Part 2

  1. If coexisting and cooperation and living together were easy, western couples would not undergo 70% divorce rate and marrying 3 or 4 times and at last going to Russia, vietnam, the Phillippines, . .. to get a stable partner.

    And Kids would stay with their parents as they did before, or they would not drag their parents to nursing homes. Not to mention European countries and their black history of not coexisting.

  2. They are crazy!
    First of all, one can`t compare NZ and Australia (or Canada) with European countries in this manner. The history of land and people are completely different, and European countries usually already are densely populated.
    In some cases even more so then many countries of origin from where asylum seekers and migrants are coming.

    Actually the mentioned countries all have a quite restrictive migration policy (of course for some years now Justin Trudeau tries to ruin his country the way Sweden or Germany are doing it).
    NZ and Australia have only a small fraction of Muslim migrants (or poor and uneducated ones), and even those few already cause a lot of problems.

    So what are those horrendous people talking about.

  3. “How do they do it? And why is it always a universal battle in France?”

    Could it be the Anglo Saxon temperament compared to the French? An ability to have a discussion without burning 800 cars. And remember they were doing that back in 1968.

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