French social scientists criticize plans for immigration institute
The French government’s decision to create a powerful institute for research on immigration and integration has sparked bitter controversy; social scientists argue the institute will proivde patina of academic respectability to anti-immigration policies
Immigration raises the temperature of public debate not only in the United States, but also in France. The move by the French government to create an institute for research on immigration and integration has sparked strong opposition among social scientists, who claim that the body is a thinly veiled bid to exercise political control over their research. The Paris-based institute will be placed under the High Council for Integration, which is affiliated with the prime minister’s office. Nature’s Declan Butler writes (sub. req.) that the government says that the twenty three-member institute will serve as a one-stop shop for distributing both public and private research funds, and help define “pertinent fields and topics” for study. In a statement issued on 2 October, though, seventy-five French historians and intellectuals expressed their “grave concerns” over the institute, branding it a “threat to academic freedom.” That threat arises, they say, “in a context where the political discourse tends more-and-more to present immigration as a danger, where successive legislation has increasingly restricted the rights of foreigners and where rhetoric serves to mask discrimination.” Note that a tough immigration bill is currently going through the French legislature. The dissenters also criticized the nomination of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a specialist in Russian affairs and secretary of the French Academy, as the institute’s president. During urban riots in 2005, Carrère d’Encausse sparked controversy by identifying polygamy among Muslim immigrants to France as one of the causes for the social unrest.
Several of the statement’s signatories are listed as members of the new institute in a document released by the government on 19 September. Paul Schor, a specialist in American minorities at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, says that he first learned of his inclusion when the list was circulated on the Internet. He says he has had no explanation for being included in the list, and that it was done without consultation.
