European Task Force on Irregular Migrations - Country Report: France Paris : Ifri, 2011, 36 p. (Coll. Les études Ifri)
Looking back since the end of the 1970’s, French immigration policy has been characterised by an increased toughening, both on the outside, through greater border control and an increasingly strict asylum policy, and on the inside, with a progressive criminalisation of irregularity.
Interestingly, and as shown through this compilation of articles, this trend has been followed relatively consistently throughout the European Union space, even in a country outside of the Schengen agreements as the UK. Migration policy has become one of the most politicised topics within the European Union, to the effect that most politicians seek to ‘make their mark’ on the issue. Another common thread in the case studies presented here is the constructed dimension of an irregular administrative status. In France, as in other European countries, migrants have navigated in an out of an irregularity on the basis of new laws and circulars.
Regularisation policies in France have never been used as a legitimate tool, but rather as a pressure valve to dampen the inadequacies of the migration policies – stricter border controls and regularisation processes vs. labour needs of the economic sector; drastic decrease of number of asylum status granted vs. human rights commitments, etc. The regularisation process itself becomes, over the years and arm-in-arm with a tougher migration policy, increasingly arduous to complete and opaque, resting more and more on the discretionary power of civil servants. Although one cannot speak of an actual paradigm change in the regularisation policy, the criteria for regularisation transitions from being family-based to being employment-based, and from there to being employment-based within the new ‘immigration choisie’ principle – immigrants coming to France to work should fill specific and targeted positions for which labour shortages have been observed.
A tougher migration policy and increasingly restrictive regularisation policy dovetailed the evolution taking place at the European level, but it seems to have a transformative impact at the local level. Two processes seem to be at play: the responsabilisation of actors at the local level who become de facto immigration officers – civil servants at the prefectures but also CEOs – or, contrarily, who voice the contestation against national migration policies, and, in parallel, the ‘cannibalisation’ of the not-for-profit sector, which becomes increasingly concerned with migration policies and regularisation issues. NGOs and trade unions at the local level, with the support of certain political actors, are the ones bringing irregular migrants together – following their own criteria: foreign workers; parents of children attending French schools; young undocumented migrants, etc. – and by this means giving them agency as a group.