In 2019-2020, a quarter of immigrants and their descendants reported unequal treatment or discrimination in the last five years. Non-European immigrants reported more perceived discrimination (26%) than those born in Europe (19%). The gap widened for the next generation: the descendants of European immigrants reported less discrimination than the first generation (-6 points), while the descendants of Non-European immigrants reported significantly more (+8 points). While these variations could be partly explained by differences in socio-demographic characteristics between generations (such as age or educational attainment), these differences accounted only for 40% of the increase in perceived discrimination for the descendants of non-European immigrants, and a residual part of the drop in discrimination experienced by the descendants of European immigrants.

Exposure to discrimination differed from childhood onwards: 19% of the descendants of non-European immigrants reported discriminatory treatment at school, compared with 8% of the descendants of European immigrants. They were also twice as likely to have been the target of racism in their lifetime.

Finally, over 29% of the descendants of non-European immigrants considered that they were ‘not seen as French’, compared to less than 8% of the descendants of European immigrants. They were also much more often asked ‘where they come from’. These processes of othering contributed to explain their stronger experience of discrimination.