Erratic procedures for applying for a residence permit, explosion of litigation, ineffectiveness of removal measures… A Senate fact-finding mission is seriously analyzing immigration management systems.
Nearly 200,000 people would have entered the European Union irregularly in 2021. Faced with this observation, the Senate’s law commission set up an information mission in order to assess the public policies intended to respond to “this challenge”. .
In its report entitled “State services and immigration: regaining meaning and efficiency” adopted on Tuesday evening, it describes the failure of the management of immigration in France: “A foreigners’ right that has become illegible and incomprehensible”; “a source of daily difficulties for State agents responsible for enforcing it”; “real goodwill for certain law firms or lawyers who do not hesitate to exploit the flaws for profit”.
appointment traffic in the prefecture
Until 2020, long queues outside the prefectures to obtain a residence permit were the visible illustration of the “saturation of the counters”. Since confinement, online appointment bookings have been developed but “the scarcity of the slots offered has given rise to the appearance of an unprecedented and massive phenomenon of resale on the internet of appointments in prefectures, constituting a real traffic”. Thus, “unscrupulous individuals capture the available slots (most often thanks to piracy software) in order to resell them in a perfectly illegal way to foreigners, at prices ranging from 20 to 600 euros per appointment”
Among its recommendations, the mission recommends unifying by regulation the procedures for making appointments for filing applications for permits between the prefectures, and allocating more resources to the services responsible for the residence of foreigners.
March 2022, queue of Ukrainian refugees at the Nice prefecture [VALERY HACHE / AFP]
An explosion in the number of disputes
In the absence of slots available on prefecture reservation sites, foreigners initiate legal proceedings to compel the administration to grant them an appointment allowing them to apply for a residence permit. “It has become a real reflex for many associations. The consequences are harmful both for the functioning of the administrative courts and the organization of the prefectures, as well as for the access of foreigners to the counters”, denounces the mission.
Ineffective distancing measures
The elected officials deplore “the inconsistency between an ever-increasing number of pronounced removal measures and the absence of human and financial reinforcements to carry them out”. The first stumbling block faced by the administration in the execution of removal measures concerns the identification of people in an irregular situation.
Four priorities have been identified by the Senate to strengthen the effectiveness of these measures: “Strengthen cooperation between services to identify people in an irregular situation, continue to increase the administrative detention system, mobilize all legal and equipment available to carry out removals and finally, favoring a European approach to break the impasse with non-cooperative third countries in terms of returns”.
The Senate’s fact-finding mission was led by the chairman of the law commission in person, senator LR du Rhône François-Noël Buffet. She was able to “take the measure of the deep disarray faced by our public officials, their exhaustion and the feeling of a loss of meaning in their profession”, according to the senator.