Immigration bill: return of “immigrant worker”

He had disappeared for almost four decades of the French political vocabulary. The “immigrant worker” returns to this thanks to the shortage of labor, which justifies, according to the government, the “regularization” component of the bill intended to “control immigration and improve integration” adopted adopted , Wednesday 1 er February, in the Council of Ministers. Regardless of the numerous reservations and criticisms to be sent to a text – the twentieth reform of the genre since 1980 – launched without even the previous law on the subject, voted in 2018 “for controlled immigration, an effective right of asylum and successful integration “, has been the subject of the slightest evaluation, we must salute the return of the theme of work in a debate too often monopolized by those of security or identity.

Long managed by the Ministry of Social Affairs, migration issues have passed almost exclusively, for more than thirty years, under the supervision of that of the interior, at the risk of dead ends induced by an exclusively police vision. In reality, immigrants have never ceased to be – also – workers, taxpayers, contributors. It took the crisis due to the covid-19, and that of the work that followed it, so that this reality however very visible-which cooks in restaurants, manages the hammer-picker, activates on the scaffolding, empty Our trash cans, book our packages, etc. ? – is essential. In contrast, the silence which prevailed previously highlights the hypocrisy of a certain employers and the pusillanimity of political leaders.

This observation also leads to questioning the real reasons why the current government has seen fit to complete a bill intended to facilitate the expulsions of foreigners in an irregular situation by provisions providing for the issuance of titles of One-year stay with undocumented foreigners working in “tension trades”. Such regularization could have been decided by regulation, for example by expanding the field of the Valls circular of 2012.

political postures

simple rhetorical balance of “at the same time” personified by the two ministers who defend the text, Gérald Darmanin for the interior and Olivier Dussopt for work, or way of justifying repressive provisions? The display, under such conditions, of the essential question of the employment of immigrants seems to be a political use of the theme of immigration. A comparable criticism can be addressed to the left opposition: why does it exclude to vote the provisions providing for regularizations which will leave immigrants of precariousness, and which it claims itself?

The extreme right has only benefited too much from these recurring debates on immigration reduced to a role -playing game where we claim to meet the expectations of the French by “acting”. Already, most of the controversies relate to the strategies and postures which will allow – or not – to the Darmanin -Dussopt bill to be adopted. Voters deserve better than this joute to potentially deleterious fallout: a broad debate where the place of France would be exposed in global flows and the state of its relations with the countries of departure, the needs of the economy and the potential of Training, at the end of which would be developed and decided, as in the process of doing it Germany, an overall conception accompanied by concrete measures and means to implement it.

/Media reports cited above.