The Senate adopted on Tuesday a tougher version of the immigration bill, now sent to the National Assembly, where the government will try to find a way through for this highly sensitive reform from December 11. Widely adopted by 210 votes to 115, the text of the law submitted to a vote in the upper house has little to do with the government’s initial version: the senators gave it a serious turn of the screw last week, with the right and its centrist allies in action.
A number of measures to facilitate the expulsions of “delinquent” foreigners
The reform, which was initially based on two “legs” – controlling immigration, improving integration – now leans clearly towards the repressive aspect, with a number of measures to facilitate the expulsions of “delinquent” foreigners, and simplify procedures. distancing and discourage entry into the territory. “The Senate has restored coherence to the project by toughening it and rejecting the ‘at the same time’ of the government version”, assures the president of the senators Les Républicains, Bruno Retailleau, architect of this strict hardening which worries the left as well as the associations.
“For irregular immigration, there is zero tolerance,” assumed Tuesday the LR president of the Law Commission François-Noël Buffet. “The integration aspect has completely disappeared from the text,” lamented socialist senator Marie-Pierre de La Gontrie. Now alone in charge of the reform, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, did not seem distraught by the introduction of numerous markers of the right over the course of a week of sometimes heated debates.
Right markers
“It is a co-constructed text”, “enriched by the Senate”, he underlined Tuesday on CNews, maintaining his watchword: “firmness”. The tenant of Beauvau is keen on this “expulsions” aspect, in a context tense by the migratory influx in Lampedusa and the attack on Arras involving a young radicalized Russian. This would have been avoided, according to him, with this reform which will make it possible to remove most of the barriers to expulsions of foreigners threatening public order, including when they arrived in France before the age of 13.
On the regularization of undocumented workers in sectors with labor shortages, an emblematic measure, the senators positioned themselves for regularization on a case-by-case and “exceptional basis”. A device far removed from the “right” opposable to regularization, which appeared in the initial text.
Other very right-wing measures have been added: tightening of the criteria for family reunification, tightening of land rights, conditioning of family allowances and housing assistance (APL) for foreigners to five years of residence, policy of “quotas “annual migration and above all the elimination of state medical aid (AME) for undocumented immigrants.
What unraveling in the National Assembly?
So many measures strongly denounced by the left, which opposed a text deemed “unworthy” by the boss of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure. “The macronie is chasing the right which is chasing the extreme right, and vice versa,” denounced La France insoumise MP Andrée Taurinya on Tuesday. The big question will now be the future fate of this text in the National Assembly, where the presidential camp is not in the majority.
The government “goes with the desire to discuss, the desire to compromise, to the National Assembly”, assured Gérald Darmanin on Tuesday. Uncertainty remains over the intentions and real weight of the Macronist left wing, embodied by the Renaissance president of the Law Commission Sacha Houlié. The latter promised that the National Assembly would restore “all the initial text” of the government, while the spokesperson for the MoDem group, Erwan Balanant, considered the text as “a provocation”, judging it “completely unbalanced”.
A next 49.3?
These declarations seem incompatible with the position of the LR deputies: their leader, Olivier Marleix, affirmed Tuesday that he wanted to “continue to toughen the text” in the National Assembly. If no compromise is found, the government always has the possibility of activating 49.3 to adopt its text without a vote, even if it means exposing itself to a motion of censure from the right, which has little chance of succeeding without it. support from the left.
In the Senate, in any case, the Macronist group (RDPI) and that of the Independents where Horizons senators sit, voted for this toughened text, some nevertheless calling for the rewriting of certain articles by the National Assembly.