The Car Without a Road
What the immigration debate refuses to see
Lire en français →The Car Without a Road
By Aminata Kouyate, with contributions from Colonel Pierre Dumas and Raphael Noir
My mother landed at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle on September 14, 1990. I know because she keeps the plane ticket in a brown envelope, between her marriage certificate and our three vaccination booklets. Air Afrique, flight RK 0712, Bamako to Paris. Three children, two suitcases, one bag in wax-print fabric with dried mangoes she never got to eat because the customs officer threw them in the bin in front of her without a word.
Nobody was waiting at the airport. Our cousin Fanta had moved from Bondy to Aulnay without telling her. There were no mobile phones. My mother took the RER B to Aulnay-sous-Bois with three children and two suitcases, asking for directions in Bambara to people who looked at her like she was furniture. She finally found the Cite des 3000 after dark. Fanta was there. The next morning, my mother was looking for work.
She found it. Chambermaid at the Ibis hotel in Roissy. She cleaned rooms for twenty-five years. Not a single day off sick. Never on unemployment. Contributions paid every month for a quarter of a century. Three children enrolled in school, three French taxpayers. The return on investment for the Republic is positive — Gabriel Bastiat would confirm this citing Chojnicki, Docquier and Ragot, 2018 update: the net fiscal contribution of immigrants is negative by 0.5% of GDP in the first generation and positive by 1.2% in the second. My brother is an accountant. My sister is a nurse. I employ 200 people. Do the math.
But here’s what the numbers don’t tell you. My mother never had a French friend over for dinner. Not one in twenty-five years. Not because she didn’t want to — my mother is the most sociable person I know, she talks to everyone in the queue at Lidl. Because there was nowhere it could happen. No community center open in the evening. No mixed-membership association. No shared place of worship. Not even a cafe — the last bistrot in Aulnay-centre closed in 1998. My mother lived in France, worked in France, paid for France. But France never met her.
That’s the real problem. Not how many come. What happens after.
The debate that serves no purpose
For forty years, France has debated immigration the way you’d debate the thermostat in a house with no heating. Higher, lower, open, closed — while the building cracks.
On the right, they want to reduce flows. On the left, they want to regularize. In the center, they want to “manage.” Nobody talks about what concretely happens when a man or a woman sets foot on French soil and tries to build a life. Nobody, because that would mean looking at the actual state of integration infrastructure — and the actual state is a disgrace.
The numbers are there. The employment rate for immigrants in France is 59.1%, compared to the 68.4% OECD average. In the UK, with a more flexible labor market: 75.2%. A nine-point gap. Gabriel Bastiat is right to cite Jean and Jimenez (OECD, 2011): regulatory rigidity explains part of the underemployment. But only part. Because regulations can be reformed in a single vote. Infrastructure takes decades. And that’s where France has deserted.
There is one GP for every 1,600 residents in Seine-Saint-Denis. One for every 900 in Paris. The last bank branch left my neighborhood in 2019. The discrimination testing by the Defenseur des droits in 2020 — not an activist pamphlet, an official report of the Republic — shows that people of African origin are 1.5 times more likely to be refused a bank loan with an identical profile. Same income, same job, same credit history. But not the same name.
When you refuse a loan to an entrepreneur because his name is Mamadou rather than Mathieu, you’re not creating an immigration problem. You’re creating an economic problem. A restaurant that doesn’t open. Five jobs that aren’t created. Five families that don’t spend in the neighborhood. Multiply by thousands. That’s the real cost of discrimination — and nobody quantifies it.
The car without a road
Gabriel Bastiat is a brilliant man. I say this sincerely, even if our debates sometimes look like a boxing match between an accountant and a logistics manager. He’s right on one point: France prevents immigrants from working, then complains they don’t work. The delays in degree equivalence, the complexity of social contributions for small businesses, the administrative labyrinth of residence permits — all of it is real.
But Gabriel makes a mistake every desk-bound economist makes. He believes that if you remove the barriers, activity springs up on its own. As if the market were a river and the state a dam, and all you had to do was open the floodgates.
No.
The market is a car. And deregulation without infrastructure is a car without a road.
Karim, Tunisian, bakery diploma from Sousse — Gabriel’s favorite example — can get his degree equivalence in eight days instead of eight months. Great. But if Karim lives in Sevran and the bakery is in Rennes, he needs transport. If Karim doesn’t have a bank account because three branches refused to open one for him, he can’t receive a salary. If Karim speaks 200 words of French because the OFII gave him 200 hours of classes — a joke, as Leonie Marchand put it; my ex took 600 hours to reach B2 in Spanish — he won’t take a customer’s order.
Deregulation solves the driving license problem. Not the road problem.
What the tramway taught the economists
I have proof. It’s modest, local, and that’s why it’s solid.
In 2006, the T4 tramway was extended to Aulnay-sous-Bois. My neighborhood. The APUR — the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme, not an activist think tank — documented what happened. Within four years, businesses around the stations increased by 23%. New restaurants, driving schools, a dry cleaner, a medical practice. Jobs. Activity. Life.
Nobody deregulated anything. Nobody cut payroll taxes. They laid tracks. And the market did the rest.
That’s the Keynesianism I live. Not the textbook kind. Public investment creates the conditions for private activity. Ha-Joon Chang wrote it in 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. I saw it from my office window. My revenue grew 14% the year the T4 was extended. I hired eight people. Eight families paying taxes, contributions, rent. The multiplier effect is not a theory. It’s my accountant’s invoice.
And the reverse is true too. When the Post Office closed in Aulnay-centre in 2018, when the Credit Agricole left in 2019, the local economy contracted. People who had an account became people without a bank. People without a bank became people without credit. People without credit became people who don’t invest, don’t start businesses, don’t hire. The deinstitutionalization of a neighborhood doesn’t show up in Gabriel’s macro models. It shows up in the shuttered storefronts along the main road.
The alliance nobody expected
There’s a man in our assembly with whom I have almost nothing in common. Colonel Pierre Dumas. Former DGSE, Burkean conservative, he quotes Tocqueville and Peguy, he believes in the nation as something sacred. I quote Keynes via Ha-Joon Chang and mainly believe in the bank transfer on the 30th of the month.
On immigration, we agreed. It might be the most interesting thing to come out of this debate.
Dumas says: France has destroyed its intermediary institutions. Abolition of military service in 1997. Disappearance of parishes. Unions at a 10.3% membership rate. The Communist Party left the banlieues. The republican school, the sole survivor, cannot bear alone what five institutions used to do together. And into the void, other structures moved in — communitarian, religious, sometimes criminal.
He’s right. I hate to admit it, but he’s right.
My mother didn’t need someone to explain laicite to her. She needed a sewing club. A parents’ association where the French women and the Malian women could talk to each other over coffee. A place, simply. A physical place where meeting is possible. Integration is not a concept. It’s a location.
My son plays handball in Aulnay. It was at that club that I met Christine, a retired schoolteacher, who helped me write my first business plan. Without the handball club, no business plan. Without the business plan, no company. Without the company, no 200 jobs. The multiplier effect of my son’s handball club has never been measured. But it’s real.
Where associations have shut down, where the football club no longer has a pitch, where the community center is open Tuesdays from 10 to noon — there, nothing happens. And that’s where the 23.4% unemployment rate in priority neighborhoods takes root. Not in the labor code. In the void.
Who profits from the disorder
Raphael Noir, our chief demolisher, asked the question I didn’t dare put so bluntly: if the diagnosis has been made for thirty years, if everyone — from the Marxist to the libertarian — agrees on the dysfunction, then why does nothing change? Who has an interest in keeping it this way?
The answer hurts.
The construction industry employs a significant proportion of undocumented foreign workers among its 290,000 foreign workers in 2023. Lucie Grimal cites Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25: the industrial reserve army. Workers without rights who push down wages for the entire working class. Noir dug deeper. Seven of the nine amendments favorable to the agricultural lobby in the 2023 Darmanin law were introduced by MPs who had received contributions from the FNSEA or its affiliates. Immigration law is written by those who benefit from it.
The political class has been campaigning on immigration for forty years without solving the problem — because a solved problem is a lost campaign issue. Landlords collect rent from overcrowded housing in the banlieues. The financial system excludes undocumented people from formal credit only to trap them in the informal economy.
And the Rassemblement National, which Leonie saw climb to 38% among 25-34 year-olds in the 2024 European elections, threatens none of these interests. It protects them, by diverting anger toward the immigrant instead of the shareholder. The migration disorder is not a failure. It’s a system that works — for those who profit from it.
Five concrete things
I’m a business owner. I don’t give speeches. I write quotes. Here’s mine.
One. Triple French language hours for new arrivals. From 200 to 600 hours. Germany does this with its Integrationskurse. 150,000 new arrivals per year, 400 additional hours, roughly 7 euros per hour. Cost: 400 million euros. France’s housing budget is 42 billion. We’re talking about less than 1%. Moussa, Leonie’s neighbor, shouldn’t have to wait fourteen months to learn the language of the country he lives in.
Two. Systematic discrimination testing of banks on lending. Not a one-off study by the Defenseur des droits every five years. Annual campaigns by the ACPR, published results, penalties proportional to revenue. If testing shows BNP refuses a Mamadou 1.5 times more than a Mathieu with an identical profile, BNP pays. Discrimination will stop when it costs more than fairness.
Three. Enterprise zones in the 20 departments with the highest immigration rates. Exemption from employer contributions for three years for every permanent hire. Gabriel will call it deregulation. I call it an investment — the state forgoes revenue to create activity. That’s Keynes, not Friedman. But the condition, and this is where Gabriel and I diverge: no enterprise zone without a parallel investment plan in transport, schools, and public facilities. The car AND the road.
Four. Reform the school zoning map. The social diversity protocol tested in Toulouse between 2017 and 2022 improved academic results by 15% in the schools concerned. We know it works. We know how to do it. We don’t do it because parents in wealthy neighborhoods vote, and parents in the northern districts don’t.
Five. Invest in intermediary institutions. Not scattered subsidies to associations that die every two years. Permanent facilities. Sports fields, community centers open evenings and weekends, coworking spaces in the banlieues. Places where the Malian mother and the retired schoolteacher can cross paths. There’s nothing romantic about it. It’s social infrastructure, and it has a return on investment — even if nobody knows how to measure it.
The unanswered question
Professeur Socrate, our resident wrecker of comfortable thinking, asked a question I couldn’t answer. If all my proposals require a state that acts — that invests, that sanctions, that builds — and if that state is precisely the one that created the current disorder, then who drives the reform? Can the state reform itself? Is there a single historical example of a bureaucracy that voluntarily reduced its own power?
I don’t have an answer. And I distrust those who do.
Maxime Vauban says: you bypass the state through technology. Estonia did it. But Estonia is a country of 1.3 million people starting from a blank post-Soviet page. France has 67 million people and 5.6 million civil servants. It’s not the same scale.
Satoshi Durand says: you make the state optional with blockchain. Raphael Noir demolished his Salvadoran example in thirty seconds — 12% real adoption, 200 million dollars of public money wasted.
I say: I don’t know. And that’s an honest answer.
What I know is that my mother succeeded in Aulnay-sous-Bois without anyone helping her, and that my 200 employees succeed every day despite a system that puts obstacles in their way. People’s capacity to build something amid disorder is the most underestimated resource in this country.
But you can’t build a policy on individual heroism. Heroism doesn’t scale. What scales is a tramway line, a school that holds, a bank that doesn’t sort its customers by the color of their name, and a handball club open on Wednesday afternoons.
My mother is 72. She still lives in Aulnay. The other day, she told me something that kept me awake. She said: “Aminata, you know why I never wanted to go back to Mali? Because here, the water runs when you turn the tap.” Twenty-five years of cleaning hotel rooms, sideways looks, “Fatou” instead of her actual name. And her reason for staying is the tap.
France gave my mother a tap. It never gave her a road.
It’s about time we built both.