YEAR-ENDER - President Macron to 'mark history' by letting far right rise in France: Trade union

By Nur Asena Erturk

With a new year ahead, a new crisis is likely on the way for French President Emmanuel Macron's government due to the country’s controversial new immigration law.

After Macron took office for a second term in April 2022, a pension reform plan cast a shadow over the first year of his new term, with millions of workers across France protesting raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.

Macron spearheaded efforts to push through the plan amid harsh criticism, with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne in the end deploying a special constitutional power to bypass the parliamentary process and forcefully adopt the bill.

This move was considered a blow to democracy and the parliament and caused a rise in violence in protests.

- Possible new crisis unfolding

France is seemingly on the edge of another government crisis over Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin's immigration project to, in his words, "better expel and better integrate."

Opposing lawmakers adopted a motion to dismiss and rejected the bill on Dec. 11 even before the first parliamentary debate. A committee of lawmakers revised the bill only to make it more rigid than the initial version, and it was adopted on Dec. 19 amid criticisms of the far-right party National Rally supporting the government.

The bill passed into law and revealed a fracture in the political majority. Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau resigned, and several others threatened to quit, while Higher Education Minister Sylvie Retailleau's resignation was rejected, and left-wing lawmakers denounced a "xenophobic" law.

Amid this political chaos, the Constitutional Council has now a month to review and uphold the law so that the president can carry it out.

The most contentious article in the initial version aimed to give a one-year residency permit under certain conditions to undocumented foreign workers who operate in "sectors under tension" – sectors that suffer labor shortages. But the new version gives city officials the power to accept or reject a foreigner's request to regularize.

The crime of irregular residency was also reinstated after its cancellation in 2012. Those found guilty will face fines of €3,750 ($4,100) and a ban from entering France for three years.

The law also requires five years of legal residency, instead of six months, to be eligible for social aid for people over 60.

It also ends automatic citizenship to children born to foreign parents in France.

Figures from National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies showed that in 2022, France had 7 million immigrants, and 2.5 million of them received French citizenship. The country also had 5.3 million foreigners, including 800,000 foreigners who were born in France and 4.5 million immigrants of foreign nationality.

- Macron to 'mark history' by letting far right rise in France

Lydie Nicol, national secretary of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, told Anadolu that compared to falling purchasing power or housing, immigration is not a priority for the French public.

"Since Emmanuel Macron came to power, the far-right and its ideas have been irrigating our society, and the probability turned into the possibility of having a far-right president or government in 2027. In any case, Macron will mark history as a president who allowed the far right to get into parliament," she said.

Anthropologist and psychologist Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky, director of the French Convergence Institutes (IC Migrations) research center, also agreed that the French public is not focused on immigration.

During the 2022 presidential campaign, polls showed that the French public's priorities were purchasing power and environmental issues, not immigration – it ranked only number five on the list, and was not the main concern, according to Saglio-Yatzimirsky.

"Looking at the electoral map of France, we can establish a perfect correlation between the most 'mixed' neighborhoods and their votes," she said, explaining that residents there did not vote for right-wing parties.

"I am sure that if we asked young people those questions, and if they had a big young voter turnout, we would have very different figures in France," she added, mentioning how most French youth didn’t show up for the polls in the last elections, and vote less than older people, who are more concerned over security issues.

Saglio-Yatzimirsky also stressed that young people in the most concerned regions are welcoming to immigration.

Nicol for her part, said the law created a "deep rift" not only in the parliament but also in society.

- Economic considerations

Nicol vowed the labor confederation’s continued, long-term resistance against the immigration law, saying that there a number of economic sectors that "would not function if not for the immigrants."

"We will certainly observe more insecurity and more poverty for those workers who don’t get work permits," she warned. "This is a major drop in those workers' rights."

Gerard-Francois Dumont, an economist at the Sorbonne who helms the French magazine Population et Avenir (Population and Future), said some irregular immigrants agree to work undocumented for very low wages, which causes friction not only with French citizens but also other immigrants.

The employment rate in France is very low, and the country would have had almost 3 million workers more than now if the rate was as high as in Germany or the UK, he said.

"Social aid is extremely high in France, which results in people preferring to get aid rather than working. From a purely financial point of view, the current French economy doesn’t need immigrants, since its employment rate is so low and continues to rise, unlike Germany where the active population is falling, and this can only be fought by attracting more immigrants, and primarily European ones," Dumont explained, stressing the need to revise the social assistance system.

Dumont said the new immigration law is not "innovative," and does not bring anything new or a structural change, despite local media coverage suggesting the contrary.

"The government already regularizes 30,000 workers per year," he recalled. "This law will not change the dynamic of migration flows."

- Law sows anxiety for irregular immigrants

Saglio-Yatzimirsky, who is also monitoring immigrants suffering from psychological trauma, shed light on their reactions and emotions about the law.
The immigrants awaiting asylum or regularization in shelters are scared and distressed, she said.

After all the violence they had to face in their home countries, and during their journey to Europe, "they are now facing a bureaucracy and the violence of poverty in France," according to the IC Migrations director.

"This new violence is extremely impossible to tolerate for them," she said, stressing how the law requires proficiency in French to obtain a residency permit.

"With this new law, the language becomes a tool of sorting and a language of exclusion. It also creates inequalities between those who come from French-speaking African countries and those from other countries such as Afghanistan," she said.