senators from the right and the center agree on the deletion of the article relating to the granting of a residence permit for undocumented workers

2023-11-07 21:59:26

The Republican senators (LR) and their centrist allies found on Tuesday a « accord » on the flagship measure of the immigration bill, that on the regularization of undocumented workers in professions in shortage, paving the way for adoption of the text in the Senate, announced the group Les Républicains, Tuesday October 7 in the early evening.

Ce ” compromise “ between the two groups of the senatorial majority provides for the deletion of article 3 which allowed the granting of a residence permit for undocumented workers in sectors with a labor shortage, a red line of the right. It also provides for the addition of legislative measures aimed at “frame” the “regularization power of prefects”according to a request from the centrists.

“This agreement should allow the Senate to vote on its own text, which profoundly modifies the version presented by the government”, explained Bruno Retailleaupresident of the Les Républicains group, in a press release. “We found a compromise for a legislative hook” on regularizations in professions in tension, confirmed Hervé Marseille, president of the centrist Union group. “It was important that we vote on a text in the Senate, otherwise everything we would have done here would have been lost. That would have been very damaging. We make landing easier [du texte] to the National Assembly » from December 11. This compromise satisfies the two camps of the senatorial majority, who have struggled in recent days to agree.

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New amendments, the wording of which remains to be refined, will be tabled on this sensitive issue of the regularization of immigrants in professions in shortage, red rag of the right but “reality principle” for the government and the centrist group in the Senate. Their purpose will be to modify the criteria provided for by the “Valls” circular of 2012 which already governs this “exceptional admission to the stay”, in order to harden them. The prefects, who are responsible, “will now have the obligation to verify, not only the reality and nature of the foreigner’s professional activities, but also their social and family integration, their respect for public order, their integration into French society”details Bruno Retailleau.

“This will in no case be an automatic and enforceable right, but a possibility granted on a case-by-case basis and only for a period of one year”, continues the boss of the senatorial right. This provision, probably integrated into an additional article detached from article 3, allows the centrist group to have “the legislative hook” that he wanted, where the LR group initially campaigned for a pure and simple absence of measures for the regularization of undocumented immigrants in the text of the law.

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The World with AFP