France, you love it but leave it: the silent flight of French Muslims

ABSTRACT

In a context when Islamophobia peaked in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks, evidence has been mounting that a growing number of French Muslims have been leaving the country. This article explores, through a combination of quantitative (survey) and qualitative (semi-directed interviews) methods, some of the key drivers of this flight from France. Moral panics around secularism but more crucially questions of discrimination on the job market are at the heart of this silent flight from the country these people were born in. Ultimately, this emigration from France constitutes a real brain drain, as it is primarily highly educated French Muslims who decide to leave.

RÉSUMÉ

Dans un contexte de résurgence de l’islamophobie lié aux attentats de 2015, des preuves anecdotiques se sont accumulées attestant que des Français de confession et / ou de culture musulmane ont décidé de quitter le pays. Combinant des méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives, cet article explore certains des paramètres principaux de ces départs à l’étranger. On y trouve des enjeux de discrimination sur le marché du travail ainsi que certaines crispations ou paniques morales autour de la laïcité. In fine, cet exil constitue une vraie fuite des cerveaux (brain drain), en ce que ce sont très souvent des Français musulmans hautement qualifiés qui quittent le pays.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In alphabetical order: Kamel Badar, Emilie Da Lage, Margot Dazey, Olivier Esteves, Marianne Guyot, Sonia Koudri, Alice Picard, Mathilde Rutkowski, Julien Talpin, Philippe Vervaecke; Kenza Talmat contributed actively to our quantitative questionnaire.

2. All names have been changed.

3. This is true despite some well-known regional specificities in the application of the French secularist regime, such as Alsace-Lorraine or La Réunion or Mayotte, for instance.

4. Hollande and former home secretary Bernard Cazeneuve had themselves used ‘Islamophobie’, respectively in 2015 and 2014, whilst Manuel Valls had notoriously decried the term as the ‘Trojan-horse of Salafis’.

5. Much of the French political elite, particularly on the centre and right, probably adheres to a Frenchness rooted in rurality, reified gallic traditions and the Catholic Church, of the type analysed in Lebovics (1994).