Around twelve thousand people crowded the first rally of the French far-right presidential candidate Zemmour in Paris. His enthusiastic supporters feel upset about how what they call traditional values have been lost due to Muslims and the far-left. French culture is under attack, they claim, the “most beautiful country in the world” must be saved. Followers of certain fundamentalist nationalism find in Zemmour their perfect ideologist. His discourse is full of historic revisionism, such as his defense of the Vichy regime as a protector of French Jews in World War II. But his allegations are not only limited to offering a new version of French history. He blames migrants for the decline of jobs. This is not something new, in fact, this is part of common sense in the populist European movement, but this view cannot be further from the truth. Although this economic revisionism is effective in offering an explanation for the perceived deterioration in the labor market, the loss of jobs must be framed in a bigger picture.

It is true that there has been a reduction of certain jobs in France. This is a statistical fact although part of this reduction is due to the reorganization of industrial businesses that outsourced services departments. Manufacturing employment has suffered an important decline since at least 1980. A report by French Treasury Department points out that Between 1980 and 2007, a 32% reduction in industrial employment has meant a loss of almost two million jobs. The same report indicates that this change is mirrored by a decrease in the manufacturing sector as a share of total output, which fell from 22% in 1970 to only 11% in 2015. During this period more and more jobs moved toward services. This shift of employment has not only happened in France, in fact, every developed country has experienced this kind of structural change in the last four decades, although at different paces and with different consequences. Indeed, the drastic transformation of industrial zones has produced social and economic effects with political repercussions. The American “Rust Belt” backing Trump in 2016 is just an example of this phenomenon.

Blaming migrants for the loss of employment opportunities can sound logical to a former industrial worker, but the reality is more complex. Globalization, and how France has embraced it, has played a major role in disrupting the labor market. In an increasingly interconnected global economy, good production is sliced up and its different stages are carried out across many countries. These are the so-called Global Value Chains (GVC), that have been molding both developed and developing countries in the last decades. A study by Chiang (2013), reveals that in 2009 foreign trade, or total exports and imports of goods and services, has demanded more foreign jobs than domestic ones in the developed world. In France, for every three domestic jobs demanded by exports, there are two jobs produced overseas. The same study shows that between 1995 and 2009, there was only an increment of fourteen thousand domestic jobs in the exporting sector, whereas more than half a million jobs were created in foreign countries. This implies that GVCs have redistributed jobs across the globe; France being one of the countries with the biggest massive loss of jobs. 

But this is not the entire picture. European economic integration has played a role too. Subcontractors from low-income European countries can take advantage of the economic union by “posting” workers to the West, replacing the demand for local workers in labor-intensive sectors such as agriculture and construction. This practice is called social dumping and is different from migration because workers are only performing tasks as a part of a temporary contract. According to data from the European Commission, France is the country with the second-highest number of posted workers in the EU, with more than 200 thousand employees in 2016. It turns out that certain industrial jobs are not only going abroad, even jobs that were formerly executed within national borders by permanent domestic residents are being replaced by a flow of temporary workers. The problem remains the same, globalization, and its imposition of an open economy in a still heterogeneous continent and world, is wreaking havoc. 

The COVID pandemic has modified some criteria. What has been considered anathema, such as the need to guarantee domestic production, is becoming more and more accepted at least for national security reasons. But this is not enough and the use of migrants as a scapegoat is still an important variable in the political debate. France is an influential member of one of the biggest economic blocs in the world, thus, there is room for coordinated policies that can put France in a better position in the face of globalization. Encouraging domestic firms to set more stages of production within national borders through fiscal incentives, or promoting technical upgrading in order to reduce unit labor costs, facilitating in this way technological transfers, are just two ways to improve the demand for domestic labor. Next April, France will vote for its new president, with an important share of citizens convinced that “migrants make all the problems worse”. French people may do better if they focus on real problems rather than fake ones.