Family Reunification Is Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s “Great Regret”

French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was the center-right president of France between 1974 and 1981, a bit more of a liberal than a conservative. Giscard presided over the consolidation of continuous postwar Afro-Islamic immigration. His biographer, Éric Roussel, has recently revealed that the institution of family reunification is the “great regret” of his presidency:

Family reunification is his great regret, which was decided by a simple decree by [his prime minister] Jacques Chirac in 1976. . . . The idea of letting immigrants’ families come seemed, at the time, to be natural. The massive increase of immigration from Muslim countries however proved deeply divisive. Raymond Barre incidentally suspended [the decree] three years later [as prime minister], before the Council of State [France’s highest court] annulled this decision arguing that family reunification was now one of the general principles of law.

We note here the revolutionary redefinition of the law by the courts, in effect declaring restrictive immigration policies illegal. This is scandalous in light of public opinion’s hostility to immigration and the fact that there is no evidence that immigration restriction, especially to preserve national identity, is in any way incompatible with France’s founding Republican principles. In June of this year, France’s highest court similarly declared a “principle of fraternity” whereby it was declared unconstitutional to prosecute someone for housing illegal immigrants. The courts are betraying the very constitution and law they have sworn to uphold.

Giscard, now aged 92, has said that he regrets enabling chain migration into France: 

The idea [of family reunification] was right and generous in itself. . . . But it was applied badly and I was wrong to not have monitored its implementation more closely; I am therefore responsible. . . . We aimed for the core family as we understood it and we saw the arrival of completely different family cores.

In short, by applying the assumptions of the Western nuclear family to Muslims, family reunification allowed enormous Muslim clans to settle France.

Giscard had also considered repatriating 500,000 Algerians during his term but backed down. Giscard has been vocal since 2002 in opposing Turkey’s joining of the European Union, saying that “Turkey . . . is not a European country.” Turkish membership would be in his view “the end of the European Union!”

In other news, the former president’s son, the 61-year-old Henri Giscard d’Estaing, was recently violently mugged and robbed by two Gypsies in Paris as he was withdrawing money from a cash machine. Just one more unpleasant example of daily life which the French must accustom themselves to since President Giscard and his fellow politicians and jurists decided that it was just fine to completely transform the demographics of France without popular approval.

In all this, Giscard is typical of an entire generation of postwar European politicians who felt that the Afro-Islamization of Europe was a mistake and yet did nothing to prevent it. German conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl, for instance, had also considered repatriating half of Germany’s Turkish population in the 1980s. German social-democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt similarly said in retirement that Turkish immigration had been a mistake.

Enoch Powell’s famous phrase comes to mind: “All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”