Family reunification, illegal residence offense, social benefits… The centrist group, allied with the right in the Senate, tabled a bill taking up most of the measures of the immigration law censored by the Constitutional Council, relaunching this ultra-sensitive file for the majority. Submitted at the end of January and currently being registered by the Senate services, the bill from the centrist Union, led by its president Hervé Marseille (UDI), intends to include provisions “essential to the implementation of a policy fair and effective migration policy”, without “any distrust of the Constitutional Council”, according to the explanatory memorandum of the text consulted Thursday by AFP.
On January 25, the “Sages” censored numerous measures included in the immigration bill at the initiative of the right, not on the merits but on the grounds that they were “cavalier” and therefore did not enter into not within the scope of the text. This therefore opened the way to new parliamentary initiatives on these measures, without excluding their being, in the future, rejected on their merits. These provisions “were adopted by the Assembly and the Senate, I want to believe that (they) can be adopted again”, Hervé Marseille assured AFP after the Council’s decision.
The LR group in the Senate also announced on Thursday that the president of the Law Commission, François-Noël Buffet, would soon table a bill taking up these measures, which will be “convergent” with that of the centrists.
Sixteen censored measures
The centrist text includes 16 censored measures, several of which had greatly irritated the presidential camp when they were included in the government bill in December, after negotiations between the right and the Prime Minister at the time, Elisabeth Borne. The “deal”, supported by the National Rally and vigorously criticized by the left and associations, was disapproved by several dozen Macronist deputies and led to the resignation of Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau.
The proposal from the centrist Union thus plans to toughen the conditions for family reunification by extending from 18 to 24 months the length of residence required to qualify for it, by excluding from the system spouses under the age of 21 and by imposing on the applicant a level “elementary” in French.
Also reinstated, the extension to five years of the duration of residence necessary for foreigners who do not work to benefit from the personalized autonomy allowance and family benefits. However, the centrists do not mention personal housing assistance (APL), which caused a lot of talk in December. The “crime of illegal residence”, punishable by a fine, is also proposed in their text, as is the impossibility for foreigners in an irregular situation to benefit from fare reductions in Ile-de-France transport.
Student deposit and AME not mentioned
Much debated, the deposit requested from foreign students in France to plan their return is not integrated into the text, but they will nevertheless have to “prove annually” of the “real and serious” nature of their studies. The centrists have not taken up the end of the automaticity of land law for the children of foreigners born in France, nor the establishment by Parliament of annual migratory “quotas”, which had been censored by the Constitutional Council under the principle of separation of powers.
As for State Medical Aid (AME), a system allowing foreigners in an irregular situation to benefit from access to care and which the new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, has planned to reform “by regulatory means”, it is not included in the text either.
The centrists, on the other hand, rewrote, to make it constitutional, a provision censored in substance by the “Sages” on the taking of fingerprints and the taking of a photograph of a foreigner without their consent. This was the only measure initially planned by the government which had been censored.
The Senate agenda offers multiple opportunities for the centrist group to have its text included on the agenda, even if it will have to meet a constitutional deadline of six weeks between the tabling of the text and its examination in public session. Its adoption in the upper house would then be in no doubt, the Senate being overwhelmingly dominated by an LR-centrist alliance.