After Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who is due to deliver a speech around 5:00 p.m. on France’s migration policy, several ministers, including the two authors of the bill, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and Labor Olivier Dussopt, will follow one another. to defend this text which must be officially presented at the beginning of 2023.

It essentially includes measures aimed at making deportation procedures more efficient, an equation that has plagued French migration policy for years and that the latest asylum and immigration law of 2018 has not been able to resolve.

The government is therefore presenting a series of tightening measures and a “structural” reform of the asylum system in the service of speeding up procedures, as well as some measures in favor of integration, in particular by regularizing undocumented workers.

On this theme of immigration, fueled “by fantasies”, the project “aims for efficiency”, we summarize at Matignon: “To be able to remove those who must be removed more quickly and to be able to integrate better through the language and work those who are destined to stay”.

– Permit with points –

The two flagship measures alone represent the balance sought and the delay in the bill promised by Gérald Darmanin since the summer. On the one hand the issuance of an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF) as soon as an asylum application is rejected at first instance, without waiting for a possible appeal, on the other hand the creation of a residence permit for undocumented workers in “shortage jobs”, which lack manpower.

“We need a policy of firmness and humanity faithful to our values. It’s the best antidote to all the extremes that feed on anxieties,” Emmanuel Macron told Le Parisien this weekend.

Within the majority, the deputy Marc Ferracci, member of the immigration working group of Renaissance, defends the idea of ​​a “residence permit with points” for “qualified immigration”, on the Canadian model. Here too, the justification is “not to be politically locked in by LR and RN on a purely quantitative debate”.

This is the issue of the debate, which will be followed by another in the Senate on December 13: give pledges to all sensitivities, especially on the right, to find a consensus.

The government has already assured, Monday, that the debates would serve to “evolve” a text not yet finalized. “The objective is to seek a compromise and to have a large majority,” assured Matignon.

Gérald Darmanin must also receive the president of the deputies LR Olivier Marleix on December 15, date from which the text can be sent to the Council of State.

– “Obsession” – 

Like the far right, the LRs denounce a project that is not repressive enough, accusing the government in particular of wanting to introduce a wave of “massive” regularizations with the title “jobs in tension”.

The Assembly already rejected on December 1 two LR bills on the expulsion of foreign offenders.

In this regard, the Ministry of the Interior says to concentrate “the effort on the perpetrators of disturbances to public order”, with a “prioritization” of their expulsion, promised in particular since the murder in mid-October of Lola, 12 years old , by an Algerian national subject to an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF).

In a document which brings together the main orientations of the government, the executive also takes up a theme dear to the right and the far right: the “overrepresentation of foreigners in acts of delinquency”. A choice that the Ministry of the Interior defends: “The government notes a reality and tries to provide answers”.

The associations which support the exiles and some of which participated in consultations at Place Beauvau, denounced this “immigration-delinquency assimilation” on Monday.

They also deplored an “umpteenth bill”, the 29th on asylum and immigration since 1980, placed under the sign of “obsession around the OQTFs” but “which always goes in the same direction”, according to Fanélie Carrey-Conte, general secretary of Cimade: “A restriction of reception conditions and a continuous deterioration of rights”.