FRANCE: Making it Harder for Immigrants

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, May 9 2006 (IPS) - Less than three years after passing a tough law to curb immigration, the French government has proposed another law to further restrict the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers.

Minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy has declared that France needs to select immigrants on criteria such as education, professional capabilities, political views and religious beliefs.

“We do not want to suffer immigration, we want to select immigrants,” Sarkozy said while proposing the law in parliament last week. The law is likely to be adopted before the summer break.

The new law would restrict “family regrouping” that gives immigration rights to immediate relatives of people of foreign origin settled in France. It would also impose a “contract of integration” on foreign applicants as a precondition for entering the country. It would reduce the grant for a period of stay from ten years to three.

“A radical Muslim husband who keeps his wife cloistered at home must know that he is putting his other relatives’ access to visa for France at risk,” Sarkozy said in parliament, explaining the new law.

The law would create a special residence permit for foreigners “whose personality and talents constitute assets for French development and international radiance.”

Given the large majority of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, the law is as good as passed. But it is being challenged by the opposition and by civil society.

“Sarkozy’s law makes the immigrant appear like dead weight for society, a troublesome intruder, as if immigrants were the source of all evil in our country,” Catherine Teulé, deputy director of the Human Rights League told IPS. “Sarkozy’s law is a real xenophobic project.”

Many human rights organisations, churches, and political parties say “selected immigration” would allow state institutions to pick the most talented immigrants, while retaining the right to expel them.

“The bill is rooted in a reductive, utilitarian view of immigration. With it, the government openly proclaims its intention to plunder foreign ‘talent’ whenever it finds it, and whenever it needs it,” Jean-Pierre Alaux from the Intervention and Support Group for Immigrant Workers (GISTI, after its French name) told IPS.

“Furthermore, the bill’s proposal on asylum law will curtail refugee rights. The bill, if adopted, will reduce foreigners, living legally or illegally in France, to second-class human beings, deprived of their rights, at the mercy of their employer, the state bureaucracy and the government.”

Some Catholic church leaders have described Sarkozy’s move as a populist scheme aimed at gaining far right votes.

“His aim with this law is to please the extremist right-wing electorate, whose only political objective is to reject immigrants’ otherness,” Bishop Olivier Berranger, leading member of the Council of French Christian Churches said in a radio interview.

Sarkozy plans to run for president in the election scheduled for the spring of next year. In the last election the far right won about 15 percent of the vote..

Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Muslim Council, said a restrictive policy on immigration would have negative results.

“If you deny legal access to people in need, they will keep coming, but would face the most difficult conditions associated with a clandestine life,” Boubakeur told IPS. “Clandestine immigration leads to delinquency, to a parallel economy.”

In an editorial comment, Le Monde daily questioned the need for a new law. “There is no urgency right now to justify forcing the parliament to discuss during the same legislative period a second law on the very same subject,” Le Monde commented. “Even less, given that not all of the decrees of the law passed in 2003 have been enforced.”

Bernard Frimat, vice-president of the French Senate inquiry commission on immigration said in a statement: “Nobody in France can say what have been the effects of the law of 2003 on controlling immigration and asylum. What Sarkozy evidently wants is to place the polemic theme of immigration at the centre of the political debate one year before the presidential election.”

The 2003 law increased the government’s rights to expel immigrants, and imposed new conditions for entry, such as a sound financial position, or a home in France.