French Left Loves Immigrants—Until They’re American Academics
29th April 2025
Trump’s ‘dictatorship,’ the French Left has suddenly become hostile to immigration and is advocating ‘national preference’ for French researchers.
The French National Assembly will now be discussing a bill aimed at creating a ‘scientific refugee’ status to facilitate the reception and hiring of American academics who want to leave their institutions in the United States to settle in France. Some U.S. academics are supposedly pursuing European options in order to escape alleged censorship of their work by Donald Trump’s government—what is in reality only a reduction in public funding for research deemed secondary or overly ideologically militant.
Once the enthusiasm of the small French academic world, which loudly proclaimed its willingness to welcome these new ‘political exiles’ with open arms, had died down, mistrust of the new arrivals quickly set in: these researchers will obviously be cutting into the already very tight budgets of their French colleagues. Are they really so welcome?