“The immigration bill, this mutating political object revealing the constraints, contradictions and impasses of the moment”

2023-11-07 06:00:09

Rarely has the path, for a legislative text, been so long, winding, strewn with pitfalls. Finally examined by the Senate since Monday November 6, the bill to control immigration and improve integration has changed form and nature many times, a mutating object revealing the contradictions and impasses of the moment, since Emmanuel Macron lost the absolute majority in the National Assembly, there is a year.

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Announced with great fanfare in the fall of 2022 by two ministers at the same time, Gérald Darmanin (interior) and Olivier Dussopt (work), this text, originally conceived as balanced, contains a “firmness” component (facilitated expulsions) and a “humanity” component (regularization of undocumented immigrants working in professions in shortage), the first being intended to rally the voices of the right and the second to give pledges to the left.

The ace. Instead of convincing right and left to vote for the text, this balancing act has undermined both. On the one hand, the Les Républicains (LR) party refuses to vote on the text if it is not removed from the famous article 3 (regularization), on the grounds that granting residence permits for undocumented immigrants working in sectors with labor shortages would create a draft. On the other hand, the supporters of the left wing of the majority assure that they will not be able to vote for a repressive text stripped of its social component.

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Supposed to embody the Macronian “at the same time”, this bill ultimately illustrates its exhaustion (its twilight?), and consecrates the return of the right-left divide. Coming from the Socialist Party (PS), the president (Renaissance) of the law committee of the National Assembly, Sacha Houlié, thus emancipated himself in mid-September by co-signing with left-wing deputies (PS, Communist Party and Europe Ecology-The Greens) a platform in Release in favor of regularization. During the July reshuffle, the deputy for Vienne had refused the offer from the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, who offered him overseas, under the authority of Gérald Darmanin. “We are too far ideologically for this team to work”he had justified himself.

A blind spot

From there to saying that the clash of sensitivities around the bill announces the recomposition that awaits the post-Macron era, there is only one step, already taken by those who believe that the parties will return to their bed and are betting sometimes on the right (Gérald Darmanin), sometimes on the left (Clément Beaune, current minister of transport, who dreams of conquering Paris in 2026) to establish a political identity and pre-empt an electoral space.

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