Maxime Guimard - a specialist in migration issues and international relations - has written his first book with Cerf editions.
LE FIGARO. – Nearly 8000,<> theses have been defended in research institutions in the humanities over the past ten years, including "immigration" in their title. Why do we still need a book on this topic?
Maxime GUIMARD. – Many researchers consider that irregular immigration is the consequence of increased regulation of movement and that it should therefore be deregulated. This is true in the strict sense, but it is tantamount to saying that tax evasion is the consequence of tax regulations: this does not mean that taxes should be abolished.
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To use Weber's distinction between the scholar and the politician, the academic tends to develop an ethic of conviction, while the bureaucrat develops more of an ethic of responsibility. However, there is no consensus in public opinion in favour of the abolition of borders; On the contrary, immigration control is widely supported. My book attempts to answer this concern.
It is generally estimated that irregular immigration in France is between 400,000and 700,000 people. You say they amount to 500,000people over tenyears. How do you arrive at that number?
Instead of the usual subtractive method – in the general population census the number of residence permits is removed and the number of irregulars is obtained – I prefer the aggregative method. I have added up the measures that lead to the irregularity and I have subtracted all the events that lead to the irregularity, i.e. the exit from the territory, the death or the regularisation. The result is not revolutionary but shows that regularization is the main tool for managing irregular immigration in France.
How does the big visa bazaar in Europe contribute to the blurring of the numbers?
The standardisation of the Schengen visa regime means that since 2001 all Schengen member countries have had to exempt the same non-EU countries from this preliminary measure. The requirement of a short-stay visa makes it possible to prevent irregular immigration by exercising a priori control over the credibility of the trip on the part of the applicant. However, divergences of interests and attractiveness between Member States mean that the perception of the risk of illegal immigration is not the same everywhere.
France is a preferred destination because of the high level of protection it affords compared to other Member States
For certain types of populations poorly protected by the right of asylum – Albanian and Georgian nationality – France is a privileged destination because of the strong protection it grants compared to other Member States. The visa waiver granted in 2010 for Albania and in 2017 for Georgia resulted in irregular population movements to France disproportionately compared to other countries. For the past ten days, Kosovo has been visa-free. It was the last of the Balkan countries to be subject to it.
Even though most of the mobile population has already left – there have been 185,000 asylum applications from Kosovars since 2009 lodged within the EU – it is possible that further displacement will take place in the coming months. Visa policy is therefore a crucial immigration control measure. More than 20% of asylum applications in the EU in 2022 are from visa-exempt countries, and these are the applications that are most rejected.
Since the 1990s, opponents of European migration policies have denounced the construction of a "Fortress Europe". But the opposite trend prevails, you say. And that's only in Europe...
I have tried to draw up a global typology of irregular immigration control regimes. Europe is the most tolerant region in the world of irregularity. It is the only one that has not carried out a collective expulsion for some fifty years. Pakistan is preparing to deport 1.5 million Afghans as we speak; the orders of magnitude are quite different in Europe.
There is also a gradual erosion of the capacity of democratic states to sort out their borders. This control capacity is not calculated in the European system, but the latest report of the Court of Auditors proposes a withholding of personal data at the borders which would make it possible to know if one meets the same person several times, and therefore to calculate a rate of re-interpellation. Through this type of procedure, the U.S. Administration is able to extrapolate the total number of people who should have been arrested.
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Technological means have greatly increased the capacity of States to detect border crossings, so there is no material inability to control borders. But from a moral and legal point of view, liberal states are finding it increasingly difficult to screen because of the emergence of increasingly restrictive asylum and humanitarian law since the 1970s.
Is the expulsion policy an effective response to the fight against illegal immigration?
The policy of expulsion has been steadily eroded over the past century: there are about as many expulsions as at the end of the nineteenth century, but the number of expulsion measures issued is greater. This is the corollary of the development of individual rights, which are increasingly demanding in liberal states, and of an arbitration that is often favourable to them. I do not think that situation will change abruptly in a few years.
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The return policy is therefore a low-yield activity from which a major corrective effect on irregular immigration should not be expected. On the other hand, keeping a few people away doesn't mean that it's useless as long as you keep the right people away: it's a policy of quality, not quantity. It concerns people who threaten public order, which may seem obvious but was only explicitly formalized from 2017, following the murder of two young girls in the Hanachi case in Marseille.
You also develop the idea of a real visa sanctions policy, which would involve a tightening of certain bilateral agreements...
There are two legal regimes concerning visas: short-stay visas are shared at the level of the Schengen area and long-stay visas are subject to the policy of the Member States, which are partly constrained by family and asylum policies, but have work and study visas at their discretion. The Immigration Act introduced an article that creates a link between the long-stay student or work visa and cooperation on readmission.
At the European level, this link has already existed for several years: it is the visa-readmission lever, set up to allow sanctions on the price of visas or their duration of examination according to the cooperation of third countries in terms of readmission. It was used once in relation to The Gambia and is based on a tool of the US Administration. It helps to create conditionality for favours that were perceived as inviolable.
A short treaty on irregular immigration. Maxime Guimard Éditions du Cerf 384 p., €23.50. Press Office