I’Is immigration a major cause of the populist vote, or simply a theme imposed by political forces to crystallize discontent? The demographer Hervé Le Bras, in a work which has just been published, The Great Smoke (ed. de l’Aube), argues that “immigration is much more present in people’s minds than in their daily lives”. It would therefore only be a “universal explanatory key” proposed by leaders or parties with heterogeneous profiles and the only “cement” of their disparate proposals. According to him, “immigration plays for populism the role of race for Nazism and class for Communism”.
Hervé Le Bras is right to point out that the concentration of immigrants does not translate mechanically at the local level into…
