Le Pen tells 60 Minutes France has 'no discrimination.' Here is what French data show

Marine Le Pen told an American television audience on Sunday that "there is no discrimination in France" and that France is "the least racist" country in the world. The remarks, made on CBS's 60 Minutes six months before the 2027 presidential election, drew rebukes on Monday from rivals on the left and in the center. Her own party's parliamentary leader defended her, but in narrower terms than she used.

The dispute turns on a factual question that French public statistics can partly answer. Immigrants in France are unemployed at a higher rate than people born in France. Le Pen says that gap comes from too much immigration, not from bias. Government-backed hiring experiments and a national survey point to measurable discrimination by origin. Those sources do not settle how much of the jobless gap it explains.

What Le Pen said on 60 Minutes#

The interview was conducted by 60 Minutes contributor Trevor Phillips and aired on Nov. 8. Le Pen spoke in French, and CBS published an English translation in its segment transcript. The segment was framed around the student and cost-of-living protests that have swept France since mid-September.

On immigration, Le Pen said: "When you take in too many immigrants, you create the conditions for destabilizing your society. And that is what has happened in France." She then pointed to jobs. "The unemployment rate among foreigners in France is twice the unemployment rate among French citizens. We can no longer import unemployed people," she said, according to the CBS translation.

Phillips told her that people in immigrant communities would say the gap is caused by discrimination. "No, that doesn't exist. You're not going to import those ideas here," Le Pen answered. She added: "No, there is no discrimination in France, sir. It's not true. And I'll go even further: it's the least racist." Asked whether she meant the least racist country in the world, she said: "Yes, yes, I'm telling you."

She contrasted the French model of assimilation with what she described as an Anglo-American "layered cake," in which each community keeps its own customs. Asked about what Phillips called "remigration," she said: "If someone comes and says, 'I hate you, I despise your culture, I don't want to respect your laws,' well, we say to him, 'Listen, sir, the door is wide open.' And we might even, for that matter, force you to leave." CBS's online write-up said critics could see that as a path to deporting legal immigrants. Le Pen did not describe a legal mechanism in the broadcast.

She also rejected the label of fascism. "We support political pluralism. There is no element of fascism in our political program," she said. She repeated that she is innocent in the embezzlement case she has taken to France's highest court, a case 567 Politics covered in its report on Le Pen's eligibility during her appeal.

Why the timing drew attention#

The interview aired about two weeks after the attack in Trappes, west of Paris, which franceinfo describes as a racist terrorist attack. A 26-year-old Black Frenchman, Pengo Bossio Wangi, was killed and seven others were wounded, according to franceinfo. The attack had already set off a national argument over the "great replacement" theory and hate speech, which 567 Politics covered in its story on Arcom's referral of Éric Zemmour's remarks to prosecutors.

Le Pen is the National Rally (RN) candidate for the 2027 presidential election. CBS described her as leading the polls. In Elabe's November barometer for Les Echos, fielded Nov. 3–4 among 1,004 adults, she again topped the personality ranking with a 35 percent good opinion, down two points, according to Elabe. That is a popularity measure, not a voting-intention poll.

How rivals and her own camp responded#

The sharpest reactions came from the left. Manuel Bompard, the national coordinator of La France insoumise, linked the remarks to Trappes on X. "Our country has just been struck by a terrible racist attack. A man is dead. But Marine Le Pen calmly explains on American television that there is no discrimination in France," he wrote, calling it "ignoble," according to l'Opinion.

François Ruffin, also a presidential candidate, told LCI that "millions of French people" face discrimination every day and that "there is systemic racism in our country," the same l'Opinion report said. Karim Bouamrane, the mayor of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine and a declared candidate, said Le Pen was "in denial." He said a job seeker with a North African-sounding name and a master's degree has "five times more difficulty" finding work. That figure is far larger than the ratio found in the government-backed hiring test described below.

Raphaël Glucksmann told franceinfo he "absolutely" disagreed. "When in France you are Black or Arab, you do not find housing, you are stopped by the police much more often," he said.

Criticism also came from the center-right. Nathalie Loiseau, a backer of Édouard Philippe, said on franceinfo that Le Pen was "in denial of reality." Kadir Mebarek, Philippe's spokesman and the mayor of Melun, wrote on X that racism and discrimination "are neither a fantasy nor an invention," according to l'Opinion. "Denying them adds contempt to injustice," he wrote.

The RN's group leader in the National Assembly, Sébastien Chenu, defended Le Pen on franceinfo radio on Monday morning. "France is not a racist country, it does not practice discrimination," he said. But he also said that "discrimination exists, but it is above all social," and that "racism exists in our society." He said racism affects people of every skin color. He added that France "has equipped itself a great deal" to keep its citizens from being discriminated against. Chenu's version accepts that discrimination happens. Le Pen's on-air answer did not.

L'Opinion also noted that Le Pen took a different line in the 2022 campaign. On France Inter that year, she said she had "an absolute hatred of discrimination." She said any proven discrimination tied to "skin color, religion or first name" would find her "in its way."

What French statistics show about the jobless gap#

Le Pen's starting point is a real gap. The national statistics office, INSEE, publishes labor data by migration status from its Labor Force Survey. In 2025, among people aged 15 to 64, the unemployment rate was 12 percent for immigrant men and 13 percent for immigrant women. It was 7 percent for non-immigrants, according to INSEE's overview of immigrants and foreigners. INSEE defines non-immigrants as people born in France or born French abroad. The data cover France excluding Mayotte and people living in ordinary households.

0%

5%

10%

15%

Immigrant men12%

Immigrant women13%

Non-immigrants7%

Immigrant menImmigrant womenNon-immigrants

Source: INSEE, L'essentiel sur les immigrés et les étrangers

Show the numbers

Group	Unemployment rate
Immigrant men	12%
Immigrant women	13%
Non-immigrants	7%

On these figures, immigrants were unemployed at about 1.7 to 1.9 times the rate of non-immigrants in 2025. Le Pen spoke of "foreigners" and "French citizens," which is a split by nationality, not by place of birth. Many immigrants have become French citizens, and some foreigners were born in France. 567 Politics did not find a 2025 nationality-based rate in the INSEE pages it reviewed, so it cannot confirm her "twice" figure on her own terms. The immigrant-based ratio is close to it but somewhat lower.

The same INSEE page shows the gap is not uniform. Immigrant men were about as likely as non-immigrant men to be in the labor force, at 80 percent against 78 percent. Their employment rate was nearly the same, at 71 to 72 percent. The larger difference was among women. The employment rate was 54 percent for immigrant women and 69 percent for non-immigrant women. Immigrants were also more often blue-collar workers, at 26 percent against 18 percent for the whole population.

A raw gap does not, by itself, show why it exists. Education, language, age, region, field of work and time in France can all affect unemployment. That is why researchers use controlled tests to isolate the effect of origin.

What hiring experiments and surveys find#

The largest recent French test was run by the labor ministry's research office, DARES, with the Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) and ISM Corum. Its findings were published in November 2021. Researchers sent 9,600 applications to 2,400 job offers across 11 occupations. They randomly assigned names that suggested either French or North African origin to otherwise comparable applications.

On average, applications with North African-sounding names were 31.5 percent less likely to get a reply from recruiters, according to the IPP summary of the study. To get the same number of positive replies, such a candidate had to send about 1.5 times as many applications. The gap was roughly twice as large in low-skilled jobs as in skilled ones. It varied little between men and women.

Because the profiles were alike except for the name, this kind of test measures discrimination at the first step of hiring. It does not measure how much of the overall unemployment gap that step explains. A callback is not a job offer, and the test covered one origin group and a set of occupations.

The second source is the national ombudsman, the Défenseur des droits, which runs a survey with the International Labour Organization. Its 18th barometer, released in December 2025, uses survey data from 2016 to 2024. It found that people perceived as Black, Arab or North African were 2.8 times as likely as people perceived as white to report discrimination while looking for work. In 2016 the figure was 2.2.

That barometer measures reported experience, not proven cases. It also found that more than 9 in 10 working people believe discrimination exists in employment. Only 4 percent of those who said they faced discrimination while job hunting went to an association, the ombudsman, a lawyer or the courts.

Weighing the competing claims#

The evidence bears on the two sides' arguments in different ways.

Le Pen's statement that discrimination "doesn't exist" is a universal claim. A single well-designed hiring test that finds unequal treatment of identical applications is enough to contradict it. The DARES-IPP test did that, and the ombudsman's survey points the same way. Her narrower claim, that the jobless gap reflects immigration levels, is a disputed causal argument. The statistics reviewed here neither prove nor disprove it.

Chenu's position, that discrimination exists but is "above all social," is a different claim from Le Pen's. It is closer to the evidence on whether bias exists. Its stress on class over origin is an interpretation the data reviewed here cannot settle. The testing study held social profile roughly equal and still found a gap by name.

Some critics' arguments also stretch the evidence. A higher unemployment rate among immigrants does not on its own prove discrimination. Treating it as proof confuses correlation with causation. The stronger evidence for the critics' case is the controlled testing, not the raw gap. Claims of "systemic racism," as Ruffin put it, are a broader interpretation. Researchers and politicians define that term in different ways.

Where the dispute goes next#

The exchange adds a new front to a campaign already fought over immigration and public order. Earlier this month, Philippe and Jean-Luc Mélenchon traded accusations after Philippe's remarks on immigration and the October riots, as 567 Politics reported in its story on their TF1 clash.

The 567 Politics French party spectrum places the RN, La France insoumise and the center-right parties using dated editorial estimates. Those placements are reviewed periodically and are not measured scores.

Several questions remain open. Le Pen has not said what legal process she would use to "force" people who reject French laws to leave. She has not said whether that would apply to legal residents or naturalized citizens. She has not said how it would fit within French constitutional limits. The RN has not published a 2027 program that sets out those details. Her rivals, for their part, have not yet laid out detailed anti-discrimination plans of their own for the campaign.

No representative poll has yet measured how French voters reacted to the interview. Reactions so far come from politicians and selected online posts, which do not show what the public thinks. 567 Politics will update this story if Le Pen or the RN clarifies the remarks or if new official data on discrimination or unemployment by nationality are published.

Differing perspectives

Does discrimination by origin help explain why immigrants in France are unemployed more often than others?

Each position is summarized as its supporters make it, with equal weight and in alphabetical order. A summary is not an endorsement; the evidence for each is weighed in the story above.

• Discrimination exists but is mainly social

  Who holds it: Sébastien Chenu, president of the National Rally group in the National Assembly

  Chenu says France is not a racist country and does not practice discrimination as a state. He accepts that discrimination and racism exist in French society, but argues that they are above all social rather than tied to origin, and that racism affects people of every skin color. He says France has built many legal protections to keep its citizens from being discriminated against.

  In their words: franceinfo ↗

• Discrimination is real and must be fought within universalism

  Who holds it: Raphaël Glucksmann; Nathalie Loiseau and other allies of Édouard Philippe

  Center-left and center-right figures say discrimination by origin is a documented fact, citing housing refusals and more frequent police checks for Black and Arab residents. They argue that denying it is a denial of reality that disqualifies a would-be president. They frame the response as defending equal treatment for every citizen under France's republican model, rather than as a contest between communities.

  In their words: franceinfo ↗

• Systemic racism shapes jobs, housing and policing

  Who holds it: Manuel Bompard (La France insoumise), François Ruffin and other left-wing candidates

  Left-wing critics argue that millions of French people face discrimination daily in hiring, housing and police stops, and that this amounts to systemic racism. They say denying it weeks after the racist attack in Trappes ignores lived experience. They point to name-based hiring gaps and say ending discrimination requires the state to name the problem and act on it, not to blame immigrants for unemployment.

  In their words: l'Opinion ↗

• The gap reflects immigration levels, not bias

  Who holds it: Marine Le Pen, National Rally presidential candidate

  Le Pen argues that France has taken in too many immigrants and that this has destabilized society. She points to an unemployment rate among foreigners that she puts at twice that of French citizens, and says France can no longer import unemployed people. She rejects the idea that discrimination explains the gap, calls France the least racist country, and says newcomers must blend into the national community.

  In their words: CBS News, 60 Minutes transcript ↗

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