French interior minister Bruno Retailleau has announced plans to abolish the country’s 2012 migrant regularisation programme.
In an interview with Le Parisien published late on October 9, Retailleau continued his offensive against illegal immigration and expressed his desire to create tougher regulation rules for undocumented migrants living in France.
“I will send two circulars to prefecture leaders in the coming weeks. The first will clarify their oversight role, and the second will replace the Valls circular: We should only regularise migrants sparingly, based on actual employment and genuine integration criteria,” he said.
The Valls circular was adopted in 2012 by Socialist Manuel Valls when he was minister of interior under then-French president François Hollande.
The circular allowed an undocumented person to submit a request for regularisation on the grounds of private and family life, employment situation or their status as a “temporary worker”.
This scheme allowed around 30,000 such regularisations to take place in France every year.
When questioned about the measure’s potential to harm the economy, Retailleau responded that his proposed measure aimed to curb the prevalence of illegal labour in the job market.
“Today, there are nearly half a million legal foreign residents who are unemployed. What are we doing about that? Are we going to keep turning a blind eye to illegal work?” he said.
“When people have come here legally, haven’t violated our borders, and are unemployed, we need to take care of them by providing training and qualifications.”
Retailleau’s comments seemed to echo within France’s hard-right National Rally (RN) party.
“Considering the regularisation of illegal immigrants is a disastrous signal sent to smugglers and immigration associations when our country already has between 600,000 and 900,000 illegal immigrants,” RN’s de facto leader Marine Le Pen commented on social media.
“We must turn off the tap and reinstate the offence of illegal residence. The French are waiting for a break in immigration matters, not half-measures that do not respond to the urgency of the situation,” she added.
Envisager la régularisation des clandestins est un signal désastreux envoyé aux passeurs et aux associations immigrationnistes alors que notre pays compte déjà entre 600 000 et 900 000 clandestins. Il faut couper le robinet et rétablir le délit de séjour irrégulier. Les Français… https://t.co/ptSwhr3krT
— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) October 10, 2024
Retailleau also doubled down on previous proposals such as his desire to scrap State Medical Aid, which gives healthcare to undocumented migrants who have been living in France illegally for more than three months and earn less than €10,000 a year.
According to the right-wing minister, this State Medical Aid encourages immigration.
“France is one of the most generous countries when it comes to healthcare. It encourages illegal immigration,” he said.
Regarding Meloni’s answers to fight illegal immigration by processing migrants seeking to come into the EU offshore, Retailleau said: “I would like to use transit countries to send back people who cannot be removed to their countries of origin, such as Afghanistan.”
He also emphasised the need to reform the European Union’s migrant return policies.
“At the European level, we need to revise the Return Directive, which many countries want to see amended”.
The Netherlands and Austria, backed by fifteen other Schengen area countries, have called on the European Commission to reform the bloc’s outdated migrant return policies. https://t.co/8u9a2KokET
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 8, 2024
