Europe is burning, don’t blame the migrants

France’s school protests expose failures of education, opportunity and public trust. Blaming immigrants leaves those failures unanswered. A response that narrows the freedom to challenge them risks deepening the crisis.

Nadia had a job caring for other people. Then an unanswered application left her struggling to care for her own family.

A home care worker and single mother in the Val de Marne, outside Paris, she lost the right to work when her residence application went unprocessed. Food, rent and household bills became a struggle. Her case, documented by Amnesty International, shows how administrative failure can turn someone earning a living into someone unable to support herself.

That is an uncomfortable starting point for any account of French insecurity that places immigrants at its centre. Before asking why people need support, it is worth asking what has prevented them from providing for themselves.

France’s school movement poses a similar question. Pupils have demanded teachers, manageable classes and decent buildings. These grievances sit alongside wider anxiety about living costs and public services. The immediate demands concern what the state provides, and what happens when it fails to provide it.

A school is one of the first places where a child encounters the promises of the republic. The timetable says a lesson will take place. The examination assumes the teaching has been delivered. When teachers repeatedly go unreplaced, children discover how much those promises depend on their address.

In Saint Denis, complaints about missing teachers reached France’s rights defender in 2014. Its subsequent finding identified a breach of equality before the public education service. More than a decade later, pupils are still asking for the conditions in which to learn. Teaching missed before an examination cannot be restored by an announcement about next year.

Immigration increases demand for services where populations grow. That is a planning responsibility. To turn it into an explanation for these protests requires evidence that distinguishes population pressures from staffing decisions, investment and the allocation of resources. The presence of immigrant families in a deprived neighbourhood cannot supply that evidence by itself.

Nor can unemployment be treated as proof of unwillingness to work. For young people leaving school, the promise that qualifications open doors meets a further obstacle: the name on the application can affect whether the door opens at all.

A missed lesson, a rejected application and a residence document that never arrives involve different institutions. Each demands a practical remedy. None is remedied by blaming the families bearing the consequences.

Meanwhile, hardship has been distributed unevenly. Oxfam France reports that French billionaires’ wealth doubled between Macron’s arrival in office and the period covered by its 2026 report. Rising asset values are not money that can simply be transferred from a ledger into a school budget. They do expose the inadequacy of discussing scarcity without discussing the distribution of resources and the tax choices governing them.

For a family trying to meet the rent, a government’s spending priorities are experienced through what remains available at the end of the month and what the local school can provide. Ministers who ask people to accept restraint must explain why those burdens are fair. Public consent depends on that explanation carrying weight beyond the people who write it.

There has been serious violence, and those responsible must answer for it. Residents and shopkeepers are entitled to protection. Investigating offences, however, cannot replace answering the grievances of peaceful protesters.

France’s independent national human rights commission warns that a predominantly police and judicial response is damaging young people’s trust in public institutions. Amnesty International has criticised disproportionate force. The circumstances of individual encounters require investigation, but these warnings concern the direction of the response as a whole.

By 5 October, the justice ministry had recorded 5,060 people placed in police custody, 87 per cent of them minors. At that stage, 1,802 faced prosecution; other cases had received alternative measures, been closed or remained unfinished. These figures cannot establish whether each arrest was justified. They require ministers to explain why detention on this scale was necessary, how children were treated and what it achieved.

The risk is a cycle in which public institutions fail, people protest, and the response gives them another reason to distrust those institutions. That outcome is neither inevitable nor established by every confrontation. It is precisely what a government should be trying to prevent.

England offers a warning about how far security powers can reach into political expression. Amnesty International recorded 152 arrests at a London protest on 30 July, including 134 for expressing support for Palestine Action under terrorism legislation. It argues that peaceful expression is being criminalised.

The government maintains that the organisation’s conduct, including serious damage to property, meets the statutory terrorism threshold. The Divisional Court found its proscription unlawful; the Court of Appeal upheld it; a Supreme Court hearing is scheduled for November. The continuing legal challenge matters. So does the distinction between preventing harmful acts and punishing peaceful expressions of political support.

The French and English disputes are not evidence of a single coordinated policy. They raise a common democratic question: whether the powers used to maintain order leave enough room for citizens to challenge those exercising them. Elections, courts, public argument and peaceful protest allow grievances to be pursued without violence. Governments weaken their own legitimacy when they make those avenues harder to use.

Nadia needed an answer to an application so that she could continue earning a living. Pupils need the teaching their timetables promise. Neither demand is extravagant. A state that struggles to meet such ordinary expectations should expect scrutiny of its decisions, its priorities and its conduct.

A government cannot repair a school by changing the subject to immigration. Nor can it rebuild trust by making itself harder to challenge.