“Like Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who expelled 2.5 million foreigners from the United States, I will expel illegal immigrants, criminals and foreign delinquents to protect France and the French people. #Remigration » This tweet, published on Tuesday and which has been shared tens of thousands of times, is signed Eric Zemmour. Elements of language largely in the ranks of Reconquest: Antoine Diers, spokesman for the party, took up the formula on France Info and Guillaume Peltier, executive vice-president of the party, in an interview given to the Figaro.
From the start of the presidential campaign, the candidate sought to impose immigration as a key issue in the election. But the parallel has left many netizens skeptical. “We found the winner of the best fan fiction “reacts one of them. Really ?
FAKE OFF
According to the figures provided by the official US Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, the agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws in the United States, the data put forward by Eric Zemmour are correct. Under the terms of Barack Obama, between January 2009 and January 2017, 2.7 million people even had to leave American territory. A figure that does not include people who have been turned back at the border and returned to their country by US Customs or Border Protection Services.
However, this raw data needs to be made consistent. The United States had 307 million inhabitants in 2009, the equivalent of 0.9% of the population subject to deportation.
To allow a comparison with France, we have added up the “forced removals” recorded by the Ministry of the Interior over the last eight-year period excluding Covid-19, which has led to a sharp decline in deportations to the border. In total, between 2011 and 2019, the French services expelled 132,469 foreigners in an irregular situation, the equivalent of 0.2% of the French population in 2019 (67.3 million inhabitants).
A much higher number of expulsions under the Obama administration, which moreover earned the president the nickname of “deporter in chief” by his opponents and certain American media. Is he nevertheless the one who expelled the most in recent history? No: the Migration Policy Institute has shown that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who also served two terms, deported twice as many. Here again, it is important to contextualize, points out the institute, because of the lower entry of illegal immigrants at the Mexican border between 2009 and 2017.
The priority of the Democratic president during his two terms, in terms of immigration, was the removal of criminals. Then came the people who entered illegally. And conversely, he was keen not to worry the families, the people who have lived in the United States for a long time, who worked there, and the undocumented people who came to the United States as children – the famous “dreamers”.
“It is more humane to send back people who have been here for two weeks than to send back people who have been here for twenty years and who have families,” defended Cecilia Muñoz, one of the main domestic policy advisers in the city. ‘Obama, in 2017 at CNN.
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