Parliament definitively adopted the immigration law on Tuesday, December 19. The day before, El Mouhoub Mouhoud, member of the circle of economists, specialist in international migration and globalization, signed the open letter from the leaders of the country’s major schools and universities to deplore the toughening towards international students.
You call for a global discourse on immigration and not just oriented towards the most qualified. What could be the economic effects of the law passed?
We are witnessing a worrying decline in rational arguments on the subject. I signed the appeal of university presidents because sending negative signals to international students means cutting ourselves off from the possibility of tapping into global skills, for no economic gain.
Until now, the dominant French political discourse aimed to separate bad migrations from good ones: on the one hand, unskilled, irregular or family reunification migrants; on the other, the talents that we still said we wanted to attract or keep. This did not work: despite progress in entries linked to “talent passports”, France’s attractiveness in terms of global skills remains below the major industrialized countries.
To assume that we can hold a discourse rejecting immigration while remaining attractive to talent is illusory. The higher the skills, the more migrants choose their host country and are sensitive to political discourse on the subject. The law calls into question integration mechanisms that were a consensus, with effects that will be negative.
The right feared that regularizations would create an incentive. What about it?
Not a single serious paper from an economist or demographer confirms this idea. Immigration flows on a global scale are determined by structural factors such as the globalization of trade, demographic gaps, geopolitical and humanitarian crises or technological shocks.
Over the past ten years, relocations to low-wage countries have slowed down, while States have promoted relocations and reindustrialization. The more a company relocates, the more it will look for territories with a strong technological and research and development advantage, the more skills it will need. Reindustrialization is closely linked to training policies, but also to the attractiveness of international students and skilled migration.
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