Nobody can tell you how many Africans live in France, and that is the law

Our diaspora populations dataset covers five countries: the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, the United States 🇺🇸, Canada 🇨🇦, the Netherlands 🇳🇱 and Australia 🇦🇺. France 🇫🇷 and Germany 🇩🇪 are missing, and not because we could not be bothered.

France does not collect the data. It is not an oversight or a gap in the paperwork. Counting people by ethnic origin has been ruled contrary to the French constitution, and the country's own statistics office says so on its website.

What we can count, and how differently

Here is what the five countries report for people of African background:

Now the part that should stop you putting those in a bar chart. Every one of those numbers was produced by asking a different question.

• · The UK figure is an ethnic group people select for themselves, and it covers England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate censuses.
• · The US figure is detailed race data, counted as 'alone or in any combination', so a person with one Nigerian grandparent is inside it.
• · Canada asks about visible minority status, then splits the Black population by place of birth. The African figure is the African-born share.
• · The Netherlands uses migration background, and reports Morocco separately, so its African number excludes one of its largest communities.
• · Australia collects ancestry responses, and publishes no Caribbean figure at all.

Self-identified ethnicity, race in any combination, visible minority by birthplace, migration background, ancestry. Five countries, five instruments, five different things being measured. The numbers sit in the same column and are not the same kind of number.

Why France is empty

Article 1 of the 1958 French constitution says the Republic ensures equality of all citizens before the law without distinction of origin, race or religion. That has been read not as a promise about treatment but as a rule about counting.

A 1978 data protection law prohibits the collection and processing of personal data revealing, directly or indirectly, racial or ethnic origin. In November 2007 the Constitutional Council went further and forbade the processing of such data even for studies of diversity, holding that defining an ethno-racial classification in advance would itself be unconstitutional.

INSEE, the national statistics office, publishes this position plainly. Researchers may study origin using what it calls objective data, such as a person's country of birth or their nationality before naturalisation, and may ask about a subjective feeling of belonging. What nobody may do is put a race or ethnicity variable in an administrative record.

The argument for it, which is not stupid

The reasoning is that a state which does not categorise its citizens by race cannot discriminate by race, and that recording the category is what makes the category real. France interacts with individuals, not communities. It is a coherent position and it has been held for decades.

The objection is equally plain and comes from French scholars rather than outsiders. If you cannot count a group, you cannot measure what happens to it. Discrimination in hiring, housing, policing and pay becomes unquantifiable by design. The Constitutional Council prohibits the data that would be needed to show that the minorities it is protecting are being treated badly.

What this costs everyone else

France has one of the largest African-descended populations in Europe. It is the destination for most of the Comorian 🇰🇲 diaspora, a substantial share of Senegalese 🇸🇳, Malian 🇲🇱 and Ivorian 🇨🇮 migration, and the former coloniser of much of West and Central Africa.

So the single most important European country for this question is a blank, and every continental total you have ever read is an estimate built on proxies: country of birth, nationality at birth, surname analysis, or somebody's model.

Germany 🇩🇪 has the same absence for related reasons, recording migration background rather than ethnicity, which counts arrival rather than descent and loses the third generation entirely.

How to read any diaspora number, including ours

• · Ask what question produced it. Self-identification and place of birth are not interchangeable.
• · Ask what the base was. The UK figure sits on England and Wales, not the UK.
• · Ask who is excluded. The Dutch figure leaves out Morocco 🇲🇦 by construction.
• · Treat any single continental total for Europe with suspicion. It cannot include France, so it is modelled.
• · Never subtract one country's figure from another's. They are different instruments.

We publish the definition and the source next to every row in the dataset for this reason, rather than a tidy comparable column that would be easier to read and quietly wrong. The messiness is the finding.

For the money that moves along these same routes, our money sent home dataset counts what the diaspora sends back, and that one is measured consistently because banks have to record it.