France – The examination of Gérald Darmanin’s immigration law begins on Monday in the Senate. This new legislative text aims to restrict immigration to France and facilitate expulsions, while regularizing undocumented immigrants working in “professions in tension.” A philosophy in line with the thirty immigration laws approved in France over the last forty years.
Is it a French disease? With thirty laws relating to immigration in forty years, French governments, from right to left, have continued to legislate with the aim of reducing migratory flows to France.
Emmanuel Macron is no exception to the rule: after an asylum and immigration law approved by his Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, during his first five-year term, it is Gérald Darmanin who presents a new bill, the examination of which begins on Monday in November. 6 in the Senate.
The issue of migration has become central to French political and media debate since the early 1980s. This coincides with the rise of the National Front, a far-right party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, which accuses foreigners of being the main cause of the increase in unemployment in the country.
In this context, successive governments wanted to show that they took the issue seriously and put their finger on a legislative spiral, which no longer seems possible to stop. Always with the same guideline: tighten the reception systems and conditions.
Going from “disappointed” immigration to “chosen” immigration
The first lever that the State can activate to restrict immigration refers to legal arrivals, and in particular those related to family immigration, which constitutes the majority of arrivals since the 1970s.
Thus, although an immigrant legally present in France could request regularization for his family who arrived illegally, since 1984 he can no longer do so after the approval of the Defferre law.
Two years later, the Pasqua law increased the formalities and conditions that had to be met to enter France, in particular by requiring foreigners to provide a document relating to their “means of existence”, while limiting the automatic granting of a resident card. .
Spouses of French people, in particular, no longer immediately obtain a resident card: their marriage must be at least one year old. And although the granting of a ten-year resident card is automatically possible after ten years and no longer fifteen years as before, these ten years on French soil must have passed in a regular situation (for example, after having renewed a one-year residence permit card for ten years).
In 1993, a new Pasqua law further tightened the reception conditions for immigrant families. While a foreigner had to wait one year before being able to submit an application for family reunification, he must now wait two years; This duration was reduced to one year in 1998 by the Chevènement law and extended to one and a half years in 2006, by the Sarkozy II law.
The 1993 Pasqua law also requires that foreigners who wish to bring their families to France have an income at least equal to the minimum wage. Ten years later, the Sarkozy I law specified that family benefits should not be taken into account in this income. Then, the Hortefeux law of 2007 added that the minimum income requested could be 1.2 minimum wages, depending on the size of the family.
Brice Hortefeux, at the head of the brand new Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity, created by Nicolas Sarkozy after his election to the Elysée, adds integration conditions to be able to bring your family: the level of French is evaluated as well as knowledge of values of the Republic.
Parallel to all these measures, the idea of “a la carte” or “selected” immigration is developing with regard to the active population. This began in 1980 with the Bonnet law, which allowed work permit renewal to be denied if unemployment figures were not good.
The change occurred mainly in the 2000s. The Sarkozy II law of 2006 created a residence permit based on “skills and talents”, as well as a one-year renewable permit that allowed working – now – in sectors in tension. The Cazeneuve law of 2016 creates the “talent passport”, while the Collomb law of 2018 extends it to “employees of innovative companies” and promotes the mobility of foreign students to France.
Difficult life for undocumented immigrants
Beyond legal immigration, successive governments aim to demonstrate their firmness by tackling illegal immigration. And if the left has twice regularized undocumented immigrants on a large scale (130,000 in 1981 and 80,000 in 1998), the last four decades have been marked above all by a repressive machinery that officially began in 1980 with the Bonnet law, which legalized the expulsions of undocumented immigrants and their retention in administrative detention centers (CRA) before they are carried out.
The detention period was set at seven days in 1981 by the Defferre law and has continued to be extended since then. Thus it was increased to ten days in 1993 by the Pasqua law, to 12 days in 1998 by the Chevènement law, to 32 days in 2003 by the Sarkozy I law, to 45 days in 2011 by the Besson law and to 90 days in 2018 by the Columbian law.
At the same time, identity checks take up more and more space. The Peyrefitte law of 1981 establishes preventive identity checks that allow police officers to ask for their documents from anyone they meet on the street, officially “to prevent disturbances of public order, in particular the safety of person or property”, but in reality he used to hunt undocumented immigrants.
The Debré law of 1997 allows fingerprints of foreigners to be collected in a police file. The Sarkozy I law of 2003 adds the collection of photographs of foreigners.
The Cazeneuve law of 2016 expands the control of the regularity of the stay of foreigners in France thanks to the possibility for prefectures to obtain the transmission of information from the CAF or from schools in particular. The Collomb law of 2018 creates a biometric file for unaccompanied foreign minors.
Governments are also reducing access to health care for undocumented immigrants. Although the latter had the same universal medical coverage as any Frenchman since 1945, from 1993 they had to resort to Departmental Medical Aid (AMD) reserved for hospital care.
In 1999, Lionel Jospin’s government created Universal Medical Coverage (CMU) for French people and foreigners in legal status, as well as State Medical Aid (AME) for foreigners in an irregular situation. SMA provides access to a limited basket of care.
Since 2003, in order to benefit from it, a period of three months of uninterrupted residence in France is required, except for vital emergencies or births. A registration fee of 30 euros to benefit from the AME was introduced in 2011, which was finally abolished in 2012.
On the other hand, although detained undocumented immigrants have long run the risk of imprisonment, fines and a ban on entry into French territory, since 2012 this has no longer been the case.
A right to asylum that is increasingly difficult to obtain
Another entry point to France for foreigners, the right of asylum or refugee status, is requested by an increasing number of foreigners, especially since 2000. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan and Syria have caused significant population movements. So much so that the total number of refugees in the world has increased from about 13 million people in 2005 to about 35 million in 2022, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
As a result, asylum applications have skyrocketed in France, from around 23,000 in 1998 to around 156,000 in 2022. Faced with this explosion, governments have restricted this right, in particular by excluding certain nationalities with the creation in 2003 of a list of “safe countries” (a country that guarantees respect for the principles of freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights and fundamental freedoms), and then placing in 2007 the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.
Asylum seekers, who since 1985 have been able to work immediately upon arrival in France, have had to apply for a work card since 1991 and have even been forced to wait a year to submit this application since 2005, with no certainty of obtaining one in the event of a unemployment rate considered too high. Since then, this waiting time to apply for a work card has been reduced to nine months in 2015 and six months in 2018.
Above all, the deadlines for making applications have been reduced. Since the Collomb law of 2018, foreigners arriving in France have 90 days to apply for asylum, up from 120 days previously. Furthermore, recourse to the National Asylum Court (CNDA) in the event of Ofpra’s refusal to grant the right to asylum no longer allows suspending the expulsion of people from so-called “safe” countries.
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