A new study reveals that highly-qualified French citizens from Muslim backgrounds, often children of immigrants, are leaving France in a quiet brain drain. They are seeking new starts in cities like London, New York, Montreal, and Dubai, The Arab Weekly reports on May, 28th.
After being rejected from around 50 consulting job interviews in France despite his strong qualifications, Muslim business school graduate Adam decided to pack his bags and start a new life in Dubai.
I feel much better here than in France,
We’re all equal. You can have a boss who’s Indian, Arab or a French person,
My religion is more accepted.
the 32-year-old of North African descent shared with AFP.
The authors of “France, you love it but you leave it,” noted last month that the exact number of people leaving was challenging to identify.
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However, their online survey of over 1,000 respondents revealed that 71 percent had emigrated partly due to racism and discrimination. Adam, who requested his surname be withheld, told AFP that his new job in the United Arab Emirates has given him a fresh perspective. In France, “you need to work twice as hard when you come from certain minorities,” he said.
He expressed being “extremely grateful” for his French education and missed his friends, family, and the rich cultural life of the place where he grew up.
However, he was relieved to leave the “Islamophobia” and “systemic racism” that led to frequent police stops without cause.
France has a long history of immigration, including from its former colonies in North and West Africa. Today, descendants of Muslim immigrants who came to France for a better future report living in an increasingly hostile environment, particularly after the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. They say France’s particular form of secularism, which bans all religious symbols in public schools including headscarves and long robes, seems to disproportionately focus on the attire of Muslim women.
A 33-year-old tech employee of Moroccan descent told AFP he and his pregnant wife were planning to emigrate to “a more peaceful society” in Southeast Asia. He said he would miss France’s “sublime” cuisine and the queues outside the bakeries. But “we’re suffocating in France,” said the business school graduate with a five-figure monthly salary. He described wanting to leave “this ambient gloom,” in which television news channels seem to target all Muslims as scapegoats.
The tech employee, who moved to Paris after growing up in its lower-income suburbs, said he has been living in the same block of flats for two years:
But still they ask me what I’m doing inside my building. It’s so humiliating.
This constant humiliation is even more frustrating as I contribute very honestly to this society as someone with a high income who pays a lot of taxes.
A 1978 French law bans collecting data on a person’s race, ethnicity, or religion, which makes it difficult to have broad statistics on discrimination. But a young person “perceived as black or Arab” is 20 times more likely to face an identity check than the rest of the population, France’s rights ombudsman found in 2017.
The Observatory for Inequalities says that racism is on the decline in France, with 60 percent of French people declaring they are “not at all racist.” But still, it adds, a job candidate with a French name has a 50 percent better chance of being called by an employer than one with a North African one.
A third professional, a 30-year-old Franco-Algerian with two master’s degrees from top schools, told AFP he was leaving in June for a job in Dubai because France had become “complicated.” The investment banker, the son of an Algerian cleaner who grew up in Paris, said he enjoyed his job, but he was starting to feel he had hit a “glass ceiling.” He also said he had felt French politics shift to the right in recent years:
The atmosphere in France has really deteriorated.
Muslims are clearly second-class citizens.
He mentioned how some commentators compare people like him to extremists or troublemakers from housing estates.
Adam, the consultant, said more privileged French Muslims emigrating was just the “tiny visible part of the iceberg.”
When we see France today, we’re broken
The Arab Weekly, AFP and agencies