Emily in Paris and Macron's Vision of the "Right Kind of Immigrant"

Emmanuel Macron is pulling out all the stops to get Emily to come back from Rome, while his government helms a plan to send unwanted immigrants out of the EU.

“We will fight hard. And we will ask them to remain in Paris!”

In a now infamous interview with Variety Magazine’s Elsa Keslassy, French President Emmanuel Macron was asked about the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris’s decision to relocate the eponymous heroine to Rome at the end of the most recent season. (Full disclosure: I have not seen the most recent season. Haven’t we already suffered enough?)

His answer was telling. “‘Emily in Paris’ is super positive in terms of attractiveness for the country,” Macron said. “For my own business, it’s a very good initiative.’”

Indeed, Macron was elected on the promise of turning France into a “startup nation” that would be more attractive to international capital. (He was also elected on the promise of barring the far-right from power, which … is not going very well at the moment.) The Variety interviewer rolled out the red carpet for Macron with a series of softball questions that allowed him to wax on about French innovation, luxury culture and La French Tech. It felt like an 3,000-word advertisement for LVMH, the Louis Vuitton holding company.

Variety is not hard-hitting investigative journalism, and I wouldn’t expect that of it. Nonetheless, the whole interview felt very fawning of the no-longer-so-youthful, increasingly reactionary president, with the most critical line about the retirement age debacle: “He might go down in history as one of the country’s most polarizing presidents, having forced through Parliament unpopular changes to its pension plan, raising the age of eligibility from 62 to 64.” At one point, the author compares Macron to Obama regarding his “matinee-idol charisma and lyrical oratory.” (Obama, who, to be fair, is quite similar to Macron in that he was another once hopeful center-left politician who couldn’t hold the line against the far-right and ended up in the private sector…)

Yet the Emily in Paris passage might have been the most glaring in its hypocrisy.

As his own government seeks to rewrite the country’s laws to make it easier to deport immigrants to third countries outside of the EU; extend the amount of time undocumented immigrants can spend in detention centers meant to be temporary; and cut back on family reunification, Macron’s priority is clear: bring Emily back to Paris.

Emily, who has been in Paris for four years now, and yet somehow barely speaks a lick of French. Emily, who as one internet user pointed out, met the First Lady of France before every meeting a North African. Emily, whose main contribution throughout four seasons seems to be creating problems through her Americanness, then solving those same problems by finally understanding an obvious cultural difference between the Americans and the French. Emily, who has SOMEHOW NEVER BEEN TO THE PREFECTURE TO RENEW HER VISA.

None of this really matters. What matters is that Emily is bringing money to France — a lot of money.

Under Macron, immigrants to France experience a two-tiered immigration system where skin color and income level largely determine acceptability for integration into French culture, not the desire to become French or learn its values.

The New York Times recently interviewed an American man — a Trump supporter — who planned to move to Paris if Kamala Harris were to be elected president. He was granted a long-stay visa. Meanwhile, a Malian friend of mine, who I won’t name for security reasons, who came to France on a student visa and stayed to work at Disneyland, traveling 45 minutes by train each morning to clean up after wealthy tourists, had to visit the French police precinct every day for a month straight in order to get an appointment to renew his visa. I don’t think Macron would make too much of a stink about bringing my friend back from Italy.

Which leads me to the final irony of the whole Emily in Paris situation. If one country is more reactive than France about immigration, it’s Italy, whose Prime Minister has been leading the charge on deporting migrants to a third country like Albania. To see the mayor of Rome fueding with Macron over keeping a white, 30-something marketing rep in their country while secretly shaking hands on the mass deportation of everyone else is particularly jarring. If only that Franco-Italian cooperation could extend to finding a humane solution, to regularizing those who are already here and ensuring a safe passage to people fleeing war and famile, the world would be a different place. And maybe then we could sit back and enjoy Emily in Europe.