France’s National Assembly has scheduled a debate for November 19 on a Socialist Party proposal to grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants currently working in the country.
Introduced on October 6 by Socialist MP Paul Christophle, who represents the Drôme department in southeast France, the parliamentary bill seeks to provide a pathway to regularisation for an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 unauthorised immigrants. The text itself puts the number who would be regularised immediately at about 300,000.
Under the proposed legislation, foreigners who can prove they have been employed in France for at least six months, consecutive or not, in the previous 24 months without proper documentation would be eligible to obtain legal residency and working status as of right.
It denounces “a logic of exploitation” and states that undocumented workers “play an indispensable role in the economy and social life of our country”.
It adds: “Although in an irregular situation, these foreigners pay their taxes, contribute for protections and social benefits from which they cannot benefit.”
“We already know, the far right will scream, but we don’t care. We can and must win [this vote],” Socialist Party and Place Publique presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann said in a video posted in late October.
Glucksmann, an MEP, won the social democratic primary on October 11 and has adopted the measure in his campaign programme.
The push by the French Left draws direct inspiration from neighbouring Spain, where the government approved a sweeping royal decree in April 2026, after launching the process in January, to grant legal status to approximately 500,000 undocumented individuals without requiring a parliamentary vote.
Spain’s controversial migrant regularisation programme has attracted close to 1.3 million applications, far exceeding the government’s initial prediction of around 500,000.https://t.co/9C23t7tZ0O
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) June 30, 2026
The French legislative landscape, though, presents a steeper hurdle for proponents of the bill.
Political analysts widely expect the Socialist initiative to fail.
The fragmented National Assembly currently holds 193 lawmakers across the four left-wing groups out of a total of 577 seats, leaving them far short of the 289 needed for an absolute majority.
The text faces unified opposition from the centre and right-wing factions, meaning the Left would need a large-scale rebellion from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist camp to force the measure through. The Interior Ministry has also come out against the reform, according to Le Monde.
Christophle has argued the text can still pass. “All it takes is for the central bloc to drop the posturing and decide to choose rationality!” he wrote on X.
Twelve amendments were tabled ahead of the text’s examination by the Assembly’s law committee on November 9, two of them seeking to strike out its single article.
An amendment has already been tabled by the National Rally calling the Socialists’ proposal a “particularly dangerous” text that would “encourage unscrupulous smugglers to accelerate the human trafficking in which they are engaged”.
The centrist Horizons party, led by former prime minister Édouard Philippe, said “there is not, and there must not be, a right to regularisation”.
Despite the difficult parliamentary arithmetic, the vote is being heavily framed by the impending 2027 presidential race.
Strategists aligned with centre-left figures, including Glucksmann, are reportedly using the bill as a wedge issue to expose ideological rifts within Macron’s centrist coalition.
By forcing a floor vote on the regularisation of active workers, the Left hopes to peel away progressive elements of the president’s 2022 voter base who maintain a more open stance on economic immigration.
If the bill is rejected, the precarious status quo will hold for France’s undocumented workforce.
The country has historically eschewed the large-scale amnesty programmes last seen during François Mitterrand’s presidency in the early 1980s, when some 131,000 people were regularised, and in 1997, when a circular issued by Lionel Jospin’s government led to about 80,000 regularisations.
Instead, successive modern governments have favoured case-by-case regularisations, most recently embodied in the December 2023 immigration law, promulgated on January 26, 2024, that provided limited, temporary regularisation pathways exclusively for individuals working in specific severe shortage occupations.
Raphaël Glucksmann has won the social-democratic primary organised by the Socialist Party (PS), Place Publique and the Gauche républicaine et socialiste (GRS), securing the centre-left nomination for the 2027 presidential election in the first round. https://t.co/5GngW4NVNQ
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 12, 2026
