Foreign Immigration and Local Development in France

The demographic dynamic in France today is largely a product of the migration flows affecting the country. But these flows are not the same over the whole national territory: some regions receive greater inflows of immigrants than average, while others are barely involved. The impact of these migration flows on local development is not uniform either, as Gérard-François Dumont shows here.
After briefly reviewing the two main approaches to the analysis of foreign immigration and its consequences on territorial development (source of wealth vs. budgetary burden), Dumont offers a detailed region-by-region analysis of foreign immigration in France, covering such aspects as the share of regional migration, the changes to flow-patterns, the proportion of immigrants in the active population, the unemployment rate for foreign nationals of working age, the pivotal role of the Île-de-France region etc. He also analyses the – very variable – economic effects of the presence of this foreign population, taking two distinct aspects into account: the legal criterion (nationality) and the geographical criterion (origin of the immigrants, whether or not they have acquired French nationality) and studies the relations between immigration and unemployment more closely (identifying “four different Frances” here). These findings show that the effects of immigration on local development vary as a function of two distinct geographical criteria: the geographical origins of the individuals and the particular area in which they settle.