Sur migration issues, the rhetoric of a France that is too attractive is unfortunately a refrain that is all too well known and regularly repeated by political leaders. This was therefore the case, on the occasion of Emmanuel Macron’s speech to the prefects and prefects, on September 15, 2022. The President of the Republic has indeed announced a new asylum and immigration bill for the beginning of the year. 2023, just five years after the last modification.
On this occasion, the president hammered home that the French migration policy is “inefficient and inhumane”. An observation that we share, while totally rejecting the measures outlined, promoted for almost twenty years, and increasingly restrictive of the human rights of foreigners. Everything starts from a supposed “migratory pressure” which would impose itself on France.
In vain do demographers repeat that migration is a social fact inherent in globalisation, that our country is below the European and OECD average in terms of obtaining residence permits, that asylum applications for the year 2021 represent only 0.1% of the French population. Nothing works.
Stigmatize the “profiteering foreigner”
Stubbornly, Emmanuel Macron continues to present our social model as an incredible source of attractiveness for foreign people who mostly come to abuse it. In sum, “benefits of the system” who would come here to do their « shopping » asylum to receive social benefits.
There is no mention here of the fact that, since 2020, asylum seekers cannot have access to healthcare coverage before three months of presence in the territory, despite difficult exile journeys. Nothing about the impossibility of working for six months following the registration of an asylum application, without having obtained, afterwards, an administrative authorization issued in dribs and drabs.
No allusion to the emergency accommodation system saturated for years, throwing people on the street, in unworthy and inhuman conditions. Not to mention the difficulties of access to the counters of the prefectures, nor the complexity of the procedures with which they are confronted.
Simplify procedures, hinder the law
This context undermines the advanced theory of a French social system that would be too generous for foreigners, the basis of the choices that guide our migration policies. Faced with measures that would still seem “too beneficial” for foreigners, the solution would be to review our rules: speed up the procedures, limit the remedies deemed to be multiple.
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