The French and immigration - 27 March 1992

In the mid-1970s, a bright, energetic young French engineer arrived across the bay from here, here at the moment being San Francisco. He had graduated from France's leading school for engineers and had come to spend a year at the University of California, at Berkeley, to get a master's degree in science.

I don't know if he ever made it, to do it in one year would be impressive at least but he now says a year there was enough. His opinions on America, indeed perhaps on anything else unconnected with engineering, would be of no interest whatsoever were it not that that young man's name is Bruno Mégret and quite suddenly – quite suddenly to the rest of us outside France – he is a figure in international politics, a commanding figure in the West, a challenging figure to all the countries that in the past few years have found themselves having to take in huge invasions of refugee foreigners.

He is the inflammatory spokesman of France's National Front, the extreme rightest, France-for-the-French political party which in the regional elections this week delivered such a blow to President Mitterrand's own Socialist party, what we would call the government party. A blow more damaging than either M Mitterrand or even M Le Pen, the leader of the National Front had expected.

I ought to say at once that I know very little about French politics but like many another onlooker, who from time to time likes to compare the systems and the behaviour of other democratic nations, I have watched M Le Pen and his Front with perhaps a more morbid curiosity than most outsiders, more prejudiced perhaps because I was in Germany in the summer and autumn of 1931, teaching school among the rolling hills, the lakes and the white birch of Silesia. I'd been in Munich for a week or two in the summer and heard about, for the first time, a maniacal German chauvinist, but I must say, one of three or four, most hypnotic public speakers I've ever heard, even though his audience when I saw him was no more than 70 or 80 people who happened to be passing by.

His name, you will have guessed by now, was Adolf Hitler. But way to the north, far from Bavaria, in that genial country town, the good, sensible burghers of Silesia, north countrymen naturally, were proof against this tinpot little agitator raving away in the southland. Ein Betrug, the schoolmasters and the townsfolk called him, a fraud, not to worry. Sixteen months later, he was the Chancellor and Führer of Germany and – let's not forget – he was elected all-highest. I suppose ever since, I've been more leery than most of political agitators who have a small following and who are readily dismissed by not only establishment politicians but the well-informed in any regular political party.

M Le Pen's National Front is 20 years old. For most of those years it was regarded by most people, including the French, as a group on the fringe. Not the lunatic fringe, in fact what set it off from most extremists, most protest groups like the neo-Nazis in Germany, the skinheads in more than one English-speaking country, the National Front did not lust after frightening public exposure in striking uniforms. It tended not to bellow and march and chant, it aimed, I may be wrong, but I think from the beginning, to remain respectable, to invite the middle class, not to scorn it.

But for years the national Front polled less than 1% of the vote, In the local regional elections of 1986, it got 9%. Now that's a more remarkable jump in the French system than it would be in America or Britain for in France's multi-party system, M Mitterrand's 36% in the 1988 parliamentary elections was enough to run a government. Well, last week in a result that stunned M Mitterrand, not to mention western Europe, his Socialists polled the lowest vote in nearly a quarter of a century, just over 18% and how about the chauvinists, the National Front? 14%. Just imagine if, in the mid-1930s, in Britain, the Conservatives had got 40% of the vote, Labour 30% and Mr Oswald Mosley's blackshirts 30%. The French result is startling enough to have caused 65% of the French people, in a post-election poll, to say that M Le Pen's National Front is a threat to democracy. If that's the way they felt, why didn't they say so with their vote? Which leads me, maybe only just ahead of you, to say, what has all this to do with America?

Well, one thing is clear from the comments of the most influential French political scientists and commentators. The National Front's success is not just a dig at the Socialist government. It's equally a blow at the other regular parties, the whole political establishment is the way one man puts it and in a milder way we're hearing the same thing in this country. At least one third of the French people find something attractive about the National Front. What could it be?

The wide appeal of M Le Pen and M Mégret is the theme in their political message that regular politicians in many west European countries are willing to look on as a problem but which the National Front says is the only big thundering, overwhelming problem, that something drastic must be done about now. And that's where they have a policy, what we now call a message they would like to send to all of us. The message is bold and frightening. Expel all the foreigners, don't try to absorb them.

M Mégret, M Le Pen's magnetic, demagogic helper – one old French newspaper dares to say he has a touch of Dr Goebbels – M Mégret says it plain to willing audiences: who took the jobs from the French? And the crowd answers, the foreigners. He proposes, insists would be better, that France stop building any more mosques, that all foreigners, visitors, should be medically examined before coming into France, which was notably true here of, only of the millions of immigrants who came into Ellis Island after the turn of the century, and that all immigrants should be shipped back where they came from.

Like Dr Goebbels, M Mégret plays to the chronic national disposition towards anti-Semitism. He too has discovered that old or maybe a new cosmopolitan, for which read Jewish, conspiracy to turn nations into polyglot compounds and, oh yes, the conspiracy has a secondary aim, to spread Aids around the world. Discount this rubbish and give the anti-Semitism the contempt it deserves. I'm amazed a demagogue as acute as M Mégret should not see that these old parrot cries detract from the wide appeal of the main theme: what to do with four million immigrants.

A regular feature of M Mégret's speeches, repeated as a warning to us all, is the line that America has been corrupted by its immigrants. In this country, the general line is that America has been enriched by its immigrants. They have over there, he says, a big problem with the melting pot. Now here he says something which may be contentious and can be hotly debated, but touches the nerve of anxiety all over Europe – in West Germany, Poland, Italy, France – and is becoming in the United States a fretful question, a challenge to the American pride in its role as a host to the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed, as well as the fugitives from military service. People, says M Mégret, of European origin could live together in harmony but with Hispanics, blacks and Asians I expect a grave crisis.

Sixteen years ago when he was a student at Berkeley, he said he was amazed at "the tolerance of Americans". He was right. I had never heard then and until very recently, never heard an American politician of any party maintain that America must renounce its oldest tradition of welcoming everybody who wants to come in. Of course there are periods when quotas are set, some of them as against, at one time, the Chinese and the Japanese, and America more than anybody gets landed with freakish boatloads like the mental prisoners that Castro decided would be useful to get rid of. But I have to say that there is an historically new strain in the relationship between the settled population and the latest kinds of immigrants, only partly the fault or the character of a new generation of immigrants. The old ones, the incoming hordes of the 1900s and the 1910s from Europe, came with the full expectation of being absorbed, after the first generation, of seeing their children become Americans.

There has been a dramatic and disturbing change. A whole new generation of Latin Americans, Hispanics as we say, particularly, that comes here and in time seems determined to set up a little Puerto Rico, a little Mexico here, a little Colombia there. Now this, I guess, is a natural reflex of strangers surrounded by the babble of a strange town. This tendency was, I think, fatally encouraged by the abandonment of the old general rule that you had to learn English to be able to vote.

Today, in some big western and southern states, you can work, live, vote, go through life without English. In this state of California over 30 languages are printed on the ballot forms. What we see, what I see, is a deliberate, though unintentional, slackening of the bonds that gave meaning to the motto on the seal of the United States, "e pluribus unum" – out of many, one. The one, the unity, is beginning to be dissolved. I hope, I fervently hope I'm wrong. If I'm right, we could have a Mégret just round the corner.

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