"Does the control of immigration pass through the European Union?"

A graduate in history and political science, Max-Erwann Gastineau was working in the National Assembly at the time of the examination of the five-year immigration bill.

Essayist, he published

The New Eastern Trial

FIGAROVOX.

- Emmanuel Macron's record on immigration is decried by the opposition.

France has indeed an increase in legal and illegal immigration, with a decrease in the obligations to leave the effective territory.

What is the government's responsibility?

Max-Erwann GASTINEAU.

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In 2017, candidate Emmanuel Macron did not stand out on the migration issue.

Willingness not to rush a center-left electorate little focused on the issue and on which its presidential aspirations were eyeing?

Expression of a “multiculturalizing” laissez-faire attitude, attested to in numerous speeches valuing “diversity” and “openness” against the sirens of “withdrawal”?

One thing is certain: unlike the candidate, President Emmanuel Macron claimed to provide an answer to this nagging question.

A response embodied by a bill presented a few months after his election and aimed

.

Promulgated in September 2018, this text was the only one in the five-year term to ostensibly bear the mark of a theme which, for years, has enshrined the impotence of politics... including that of the very last governments.

Read alsoWhy immigration increased sharply in France in 2021

The statistical report mentioned in your question is clear: under the Macron five-year term, immigration continued to increase in unprecedented proportions.

The 272,000 residence permits granted in 2021 attest to this.

The words spoken on November 26, 2020 by the director of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii), Didier Leschi, summarize the scope:

Is it the fault of a lack of promptness, favored by an ideological impregnation contrary to the regulatory ambitions displayed?

Let’s go back for a moment to the content of this bill:

- Extension of family reunification, not only to direct ascendants in the first degree, but also to brothers and sisters of “protected” minors;

- Extension of the protection of the Ofpra (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) to young girls and boys running “a risk of sexual mutilation”;

- Possibility for foreigners who are victims of domestic violence or threatened with forced marriage to obtain the renewal of their residence permit as of right when the victim has lodged a complaint against the perpetrator;

- Prohibition of detaining persons in an irregular situation on the sole ground that they refuse to give their fingerprints or conceal information relating to their migratory route or their family situation;

- Abolition of the increase from four to six days in the period of validity of the order of the judge of freedoms and detention, which allowed the police to carry out home visits in the context of house arrest .

So many measures showing a concern that some will consider "humanistic", but which are not likely to stem the flow.

We can certainly, in reverse, highlight some advances made possible by this bill, such as the extension of the period of detention of people in an irregular situation (from 45 to 90 days).

But how effective, if at the same time no diplomatic pressure comes to bear on the countries of origin, mainly African, to force them to take back their nationals?

We can, more recently, highlight the decision of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, to

(convicted for acts of delinquency or “radicalized”), but why wait until May 2021?

We can support the grievances of the same minister, concerning the weight that the extension of the European jurisprudential straitjacket places on his action, but what has not been done to emancipate himself from it, or at the very least to loosen the vice that places the French administrative services between the hammer of the judges and the anvil of human rights?

Far from promoting "successful integration", Emmanuel Macron's five-year term will have denied its purpose until the end: assimilation.

Far from strengthening the "control of migratory flows", Emmanuel Macron's five-year term will have suffered them.

Max-Erwann Gastineau

Far from promoting "successful integration", Emmanuel Macron's five-year term will have denied its purpose until the end: assimilation.

Far from reinforcing the "control of migratory flows", Emmanuel Macron's five-year term will have suffered them.

He will have undergone legal immigration accentuated by the legislative lyricism of his majority;

undergone the transformation of the asylum procedure into a legal route for illegal immigration (according to 2019 figures: 78% of those whose asylum rights are rejected remain in France), amply attested by the congestion of accommodation and the increase, each year, in the appropriations allocated to their creation (1.85 billion euros in 2021, i.e. nearly two-thirds of the appropriations allocated to the budgetary mission “immigration, asylum and integration”);

he will have suffered the rise of the

illegal immigration as evidenced by the figures of state medical aid (AME), which finances the care of people in an irregular situation.

While Gérald Darmanin had announced that the fight against illegal immigration was the "priority" of his action, the number of beneficiaries of the AME amounted to more than 383,000 on December 31, 2020 (compared to 334,546 beneficiaries in 2019 ), for an increasing cost from year to year, the budget of the AME now exceeding one billion euros, excluding urgent care...

France took over the presidency of the European Union.

Is an agreement with the leaders of EU countries the only solution for France?

Is this the only real action scale?

Emmanuel Macron remains faithful to his doctrine, expressed in 2017: “our future passes through Europe”.

He intends to take advantage of the French presidency of the EU to translate this act of faith.

His proposal to establish a political government of the Schengen area (steered by the interior ministers of the member states) will go through an agreement between European heads of state and government.

It could be a step forward, like the idea of ​​strengthening the role of national border police.

Read alsoImmigration: Emmanuel Macron's campaign goes through Europe

Whatever happens to these proposals, European public action cannot abstain from a fundamental reflection on the sclerosing effects induced by the activism of the Community authorities, and in particular of the all-powerful Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), whose case law is cheerfully taken up by national courts. Jurisprudence favoring an

, summarizes the former Secretary General of the Constitutional Council, Jean-Éric Schoettl. Jurisprudence which, in a more concrete way, condemns the penalization of the irregularity of the stay, limits the possibilities of detention of the asylum seeker to the proof that he constitutes "a real, current and sufficiently serious threat, affecting a fundamental interest of society", sanctifies the right to family reunification and the attacks that could represent the implementation of more proactive public policies, based in particular on the establishment of quotas...

Only the States are in a position to assess the level and quality of the immigration they receive, to anticipate its effects with regard to their reception capacities and in the face of the imperative of safeguarding, too often neglected, their own inner cohesion.

Max-Erwann Gastineau

If the European level can come to supplement the action of the States, it cannot call into question their preeminence on a highly sovereign ground, mixing national "identity" and "security", two themes recognized by article 4 of the treaty of the EU, which calls for respect for the first and qualifies the second as falling under the

.

Only the States are in a position to assess the level and quality of the immigration they receive, to anticipate its effects with regard to their reception capacities and in the face of the imperative of safeguarding, too often neglected, their own inner cohesion.

Emmanuel Macron wanted to meet this February 2 in Tourcoing the European interior ministers, who will meet on February 3 and 4 in Lille for an informal council.

In six months, can the president draw a way out of the crisis?

Is it an impossible challenge?

As long as immigration is above all approached from its organizational and technical angle - with a view, for example, to calling for a better distribution of refugees, via the establishment of

, as promoted by the European Commission in 2015 - any "exit from the crisis" will prove illusory, if not ephemeral.

When the handle of public action trembles, strikes in the wrong place, it is badly held.

When it is badly held, it is because its use is indisposing… The European battle for the regulation of migratory flows involves a cultural and ideological battle in which France must play its full part.

Immigration is acclaimed for its economic benefits, the future it would guarantee to European societies and aging retirement systems, thus dismissing its direct (communitarianism, Islamism) and indirect cultural misdeeds.

Max-Erwann Gastineau

On reading the reports of the Commission or the European Parliament, we measure how much immigration is acclaimed for its economic benefits, the future that it would guarantee to European societies and aging pension systems, thus dismissing its direct cultural misdeeds (communitarianism, Islamism) and indirect.

Heard by the Senate on May 20 on the issue of the birth rate, the new High Commissioner for Planning, François Bayrou, recalled that immigration could not be the solution to our demographic problems, except to deny its effect on

(sic):

.

Read alsoImmigration: Macron wants a Schengen reform without modifying the return directive

What proposals can respond to the

The President of the Republic was clearly alluding here to the underhanded action of Belarus, Russia and Turkey, which have used immigration to put pressure on the EU.

Once again, let's denounce things but let's not pay ourselves with words.

We are destabilized because we are “destabilizable”, carried away by a rhetoric of values ​​that upsets the necessary balance between human rights and citizens' rights, individual protections and national cohesion.

To make Europe less vulnerable, less subject to the most grotesque migratory manipulations, such as those recently employed by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, we will have to rediscover the meaning of our political communities, the borders that make them less odious than possible, accept the the exercise of the constraint that their protection presupposes and the institution of renewed cooperation with the African and Asian countries crossed by the asylum route leading to Europe.

To regain lost room for maneuver and set Europe on the path of moral and political rearmament, our neighbors are not waiting for the French presidency of the EU.

Max-Erwann Gastineau

We will have to implement all the necessary legal levers.

Democracy presupposes checks and balances and jurisdictions capable, in complete independence, of containing political abuses.

Democracy also presupposes the possibility for a people and its representatives to undo what has been done;

the ability to revise the rule of law, our constitutions, and renegotiate previously ratified treaties.

Inter-governmental meetings can no longer suspend the emergency.

To regain lost room for maneuver and set Europe on the path of moral and political rearmament, our neighbors are not waiting for the French presidency of the EU.

Let us think of Denmark, which knew how to put its will to fight against separatism - embodied by the plan "a Denmark without a parallel society" - in adequacy with its diplomacy and its migration policy.

The Danish Social Democratic government thus added its voice to that of Poland, in a letter calling on the Commission to change its migration doctrine.

On June 3, it succeeded in adopting a law assuming its "deterrent" effect, providing for the creation of a status of "refugees in a third country", in other words: the impossibility made to any applicant for

"The external processing of asylum applications raises fundamental questions both about access to asylum procedures and effective access to protection"

, announced in response to the Danish government Adalbert Jahnz, spokesperson for the European Commission.

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One more revision to put on the agenda of Emmanuel Macron's European agenda?