France’s Immigration Debate Is Hurtling to the Right
On Monday, Emmanuel Macron’s government lost a vote on a new immigration law, as right-wing parties demanded even tighter limits. Faced with a harshening political climate, France’s 700,000 undocumented workers have little hope of gaining regular status.
French president Emmanuel Macron (C) at a press conference with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin in northern France. (Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images)
Upward of seven hundred thousand people live and work in France without papers or with fake documents, France’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told an interviewer in late 2021. In a workforce of nearly twenty-seven million, it’s clear that much of the economy depends on migrant labor. The refusal to grant these workers legal status exposes them to terrible conditions in the jobs they most often find their way into — on construction sites, in restaurant kitchens, or in gig economy jobs with the likes of Uber and Deliveroo.
Yet France is currently debating an immigration bill that would further threaten the rights of foreigners residing in the country. Besides a small tweak to extend legal status to a fraction of undocumented workers, Darmanin’s bill “to control immigration and improve integration” amounts to a wish list of xenophobic and nationalist policy changes. Even so, the proposed legislation was held up by a successful “motion to reject” in the National Assembly on December 11, as right-wing opposition parties jockey for even more sway over France’s tightening immigration system.
Bosses’ Control Over Migrants
“Sans-papiers,” literally “without papers,” is a political term, which undocumented people put forward in their struggles to demand their rights. It entered general use in the 1970s, during the movement against the executive orders that first linked work contracts and residency permits. Mobilizations of sans-papiers have led, historically, to massive “regularizations” of worker status: 130,000 foreigners were regularized in 1981–82, and 88,000 in 1997–98.
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