PARIS — Every year in France, the Vietnamese diaspora celebrates its biggest cultural event of the Lunar New Year, Têt. This year, in the town of Nogent-sur-Marne, east of Paris, some 4,000 participants flocked to the traditional Vietnamese market on Feb. 1, to sample banh mi, spring rolls and banh chung, served from colorful stands adorned with apricot blossoms. Even if event’s scenography features traditional Vietnamese decorations, almost all the passers-by were dressed in Western style.
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According to the Vietnamese ambassador to France, Dinh Toàn Thang, Têt is not just a community festival, but a special occasion to “celebrate the friendship between the two countries,” while allowing the diaspora to maintain ties with their culture of origin.
The town’s mayor, Jacques J. P. Martin, was on hand to remind participants that democratic values were a solid foundation on which to build this respectful friendship between two states, but also two peoples and two cultures.
“Southeast Asian immigration” is a specific category of statistics at France’s national statistics agency (INSEE), which includes people living in France but born in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos, and whose nationality at birth was that of one of these three countries of the former Indochina. There are just over 300,000 people from these countries living in France over the past two generations: 153,000 immigrants, and 185,000 descendants of immigrants.
In an unprecedented study of its synthesis and analysis, exclusively unveiled by Le Figaro, the Observatory of Immigration and Demography (OID) think tank highlights the “remarkable integration trajectory” of this population from Southeast Asia, offering a virtuous model of immigration that benefits the host country.
OID Director General Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti told Le Figaro: “There is not one immigration, but many, and it is the challenge of this note to show this.” He “regrets that the debate on immigration too often apprehends it as a block, a monolithic reality, whereas it covers very different dynamics from one community to another.”
Academic over-achievement
This diaspora’s arrival in France from the former Indochina, which was part of the French colonial empire until the end of the Indochina war in 1954, took place in difficult circumstances.
Like others, this immigration is mainly linked to France’s post-colonial history, with successive waves of arrivals stretching from the 1960s to the 1990s — the best-known being the massive arrival of the “boat people” from 1975 onward, for whom France is the second most important land of asylum in terms of the number of refugees received, after the United States. For the most part, these immigrants were fleeing the decolonization war in Indochina, then the war in Vietnam, and the civil wars in Cambodia and Laos.
When they arrive in France, the OID study points out, Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese are generally those with the least mastery of the French language: half of them, says INSEE, do not understand the language and are unable to read or speak it. But the study highlights the exceptional integration trajectory achieved by this immigrant population between the first and second generations, bearing witness to a strong investment by families from South-East Asia in promoting academic success and merit among their children.
In the space of a single generation, people from Southeast Asia moved from the lowest to the highest scores
For example, 44% of (first generation) immigrants from Southeast Asia have no academic qualifications, making them one of the least educated immigrant populations in France. But in the next generation, the descendants of immigrants from Southeast Asia are less than 7% without any diploma, which is the lowest rate of all the descendants of immigrants in France.
“In the space of a single generation, people from Southeast Asia have moved from the lowest to the highest scores in terms of diploma levels — despite a family background of lower qualifications and less proficiency in the French language,” the OID says.
This academic over-achievement has been of interest to the French Ministry of Education on a number of occasions, with a report in 2019 pointing out that “children of Asian origin of both sexes stand out for their over-achievement, even when compared with native French children, girls even more so than boys: fewer repeat years in elementary school, higher academic levels in sixth grade and then at the end of ninth grade, more frequent orientation toward selective courses of study, record rates of general Baccalaureate diplomas, particularly in science.”
Family roles
In 2019, sociologist Yaël Brinbaum demonstrated this over-achievement in schooling in trajectory surveys that decipher the respective success of groups of pupils according to their origin. Her results have been analyzed at length by the OID: If we take, for example, the marks obtained by pupils in the continuous test for the “brevet des collèges” (middle school leaving certificate), children born in France of Asian parents obtain much higher averages than children from other communities, and even children whose parents are French, for both boys and girls .
First-generation immigrants have an unemployment rate of just 3.2%.
The children of Southeast Asian immigrants also have the highest number of Baccalaureate holders: 89% of them pass the end-of-school “Bac” exam, compared with 80% for the national average, with children from other communities lagging far behind. Only 69% of the descendants of Turkish immigrants have the Bac, and 71% of the descendants of North African immigrants.
But while their children are successfully integrated thanks to their greater success at school, the first generation of immigrants from Southeast Asia is also very well integrated into the labor market, despite their difficulties in mastering the French language and their lower level of qualification. In fact, first-generation immigrants have an unemployment rate of just 3.2%, according to INSEE figures quoted by the OID — compared to the unemployment rate for all immigrants, which peaks at 11.2%, and even to that of people with no migratory ancestry, which in France is 6.5%.
These results are highlighted by an analysis showing the differences in family environment from one community to another. According to demographer Gérard-François Dumont, quoted in the study, “the children of immigrants can only integrate successfully if the family environment acts as a spur.” He adds that among the Vietnamese, “the family places education and school performance at the heart of its concerns. As a result, the family is a remarkable melting pot for integration.”
Limited post-colonial resentment
According to data analyzed by Yaël Brinbaum, for example, families from Asian immigrant backgrounds have higher educational aspirations than others: 86% of girls and 79% of boys from this immigrant background expect their child to pass the Bac — a much higher figure than in other families. In this way, parental encouragement plays a decisive role in their children’s success.
“Our study clearly shows the essential role played by family structures and the values passed on by parents,” the OID’s Nicolas Pouvreau-Mont says. “Among Southeast Asian immigrant families, we observe a very strong confidence in the institutions of the host society, and in particular in the school system, as well as a pacified relationship with authority and a strong recognition of the responsibility of families in matters of education.”
This immigration plays a beneficial role in France.
This confidence is all the more commendable given that the memory of the Indochina war do not seem to be fueling post-colonial resentment, as is more the case among other immigrant populations. Historical grudges are not inevitable — as long as they are not deliberately fuelled by the regimes of the countries of origin.
Breaking free
The study also highlights the greater ability of people from this diaspora from the former Indochina to break away from community logic. The descendants of immigrants from Southeast Asia are the second least endogamous generation of immigrants: Only 14% of them live with a spouse of the same origin (compared with 35% of all descendants of immigrants).
Moreover, the social life of Southeast Asian immigrants is more focused on the host country than the country of origin (only 1% have spent at least one year in their country of birth since arriving in France, the lowest rate among all immigrants). And only 6% have taken part in elections in their country of origin. Finally, 97% of them say they feel “at home in France” — a higher rate than among people whose parents are both French!
At the end of the study, the OID concludes that this immigration plays a beneficial role in France, and advocates more selective immigration, while regretting that no comparative studies exist in France on the “fiscal balance” of immigrants. Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti encourages French researchers to draw inspiration from more systematic studies published abroad: “In the Netherlands, for example, an anthropologist with a degree from the University of Amsterdam, Jan van de Beek, has published a fascinating study Borderless Welfare State — The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances. It’s a report that evaluates the cost or benefit, for Dutch public finances, of each immigration.
