Attacking Migrants to Coax Marine Le Pen
France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, was chosen as a sop to the far right — and now he is tightening rules on migrant regularization. Emmanuel Macron’s government is increasingly serving Marine Le Pen’s policy agenda before she even reaches power.
French minister Bruno Retailleau last week said France risks being “submerged” by migrants. (Lou Benoist / AFP via Getty Images)
It’s one of those ruthless little steps that French politics seems to live off nowadays. On Friday, January 24, hard-line interior minister Bruno Retailleau moved to leave his mark on the country’s immigration system, issuing an administrative order to restrict the pathway to official work and residency status for undocumented immigrants living in France.
In the three-page document, Retailleau pared down the criteria according to which prefects — the leading state authorities in each French département — can normalize an undocumented immigrant’s residency status. His decree specifies that individuals must now be able to prove seven years of presence on French soil, as opposed to the five years stipulated under the prior norms on “exceptional residency authorizations.”
Retailleau’s order does not create a specific right for undocumented immigrants seeking official papers. Rather, it reaffirms that it’s a decision for the prefecture in each of France’s nearly one hundred local départements. Moreover, individuals applying for normalized status must prove that they work in an industry suffering labor shortages — one of the requirements included in a stringent immigration law adopted in early 2024. A list of these sectors is expected to be released in late February.
In line with the 2024 law, Retailleau’s order likewise specifies stricter criteria for “exceptional” regularization, notably that undocumented immigrants prove that they present no “threat” to public order and prove their integration into society through their command of the French language and respect for republican “values.”
“This is an order for firmness,” Retailleau told reporters shortly after issuing his new guidelines, claiming that the French public wanted to turn the page on the allegedly “light-touch” treatment of undocumented immigrants. “Regularization is not a right,” the interior minister continued, arguing that rules on gaining residency papers must not provide an “incentive to illegality.”
NGOs and immigrant rights defenders have blasted the order. They decry a move that adds to local prefects’ arbitrary power. Narrowing the pathway to official status for the undocumented population, the new policy, they warn, will only serve to aggravate the administrative and job precarity experienced by so-called “paperless” immigrants.
“What’s most worrying here is that the goal of this order is not to integrate people into French society,” Aurore Krizoua, a campaigner with the immigrant rights association La Cimade, told Jacobin. “It’s to stigmatize and keep these people on the margins.”
According to the Interior Ministry’s own estimates, there are upward of eight hundred thousand undocumented immigrants currently residing in France. In 2023, as few as thirty-four thousand of them achieved a normalization of their status. Out of that already small share, only 11,500 gained papers based on their employment status.
With his order, Retailleau claims to have “simplified” the procedure for administrators. But to observers, his effort at simplification amounts to a paring down of the avenues to regularization, notably by eliding criteria such as family ties in France in favor of a sole focus on economic factors. Even that standard could be watered down depending on the list of industries deemed to be suffering labor market tensions.
“It was already hard enough to obtain and prove five years of employment under the preceding guidelines,” Évelyne Sire-Marin, vice president of the Human Rights League, told Jacobin. The further raising of that administrative hurdle will only prolong the time that an undocumented immigrant will spend on the margins, whether that’s at the whims of so-called “sleep merchants” in the housing black market or in fear of random police checks in public spaces. “Leaving the place where you live as an undocumented immigrant is a constant risk.”
Retailleau’s order repeals the “Valls memo,” named for a 2012 policy established by Manuel Valls — at the time interior minister for the Parti Socialiste (PS) — that specified the criteria according to which prefects could issue exceptional residency permits. Valls, who has since left the PS and joined Emmanuel Macron’s camp, is now back in government, serving alongside Retailleau as minister of France’s overseas territories.
“Feeling of Submersion”
Retailleau’s order will probably have little to no effect on the number of people seeking to move to France and, likewise, on his desired uptick in deportations. Last October, Retailleau issued similar administrative guidelines to prefects on orders for foreigners to leave French territory. Yet as few as 7 percent of those deportation orders are carried out, often because of the impossibility of the individual returning to their country of origin. Instead, orders like these largely serve to keep France’s undocumented population — those already in the country and the people set to come — in a precarious state of limbo, at the margin of the law and under the thumb of employers and traffickers who can exploit these individuals’ lack of official status.
“Seven years without papers is seven years spent with fear constantly in the back of your mind,” said Krizoua. “You also have to think about what that means in terms of employment. French labor law has protections, but the law can’t protect people who work without official status. . . . These people have to live and work with a nonintegration that is externally imposed.”
“It’s a crass political move,” said Sire-Marin.
Indeed, one key question is whether Retailleau’s “firmness” will be enough to woo Marine Le Pen and the far right. Having survived the cabinet reshuffle that followed the collapse of Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government in December, Retailleau was reappointed as interior minister by incoming premier François Bayrou in order to preserve the fragile centrist and right-wing minority coalition that has governed France since September. Formerly a senator for the conservative Les Républicains, Retailleau is known as a hawkish ideologue on immigration and was likely kept on deck by Bayrou in order to keep a channel open with Le Pen and her allies, whose votes in the National Assembly could prove critical for the government’s survival.
On Monday, Bayrou triggered a special clause of the French constitution to force the adoption of the 2025 budget and a social-security financing bill through parliament without a vote. Barnier’s use of the same power — the so-called 49.3 — provoked the no-confidence vote in December, supported by the Left and the far right in parliament, that brought down his government. The left-wing party La France Insoumise, alongside its Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) coalition partners the Écologistes and the Parti Communiste Français, are expected to submit another no-confidence motion over the upcoming budget.
Since his appointment as premier, Bayrou has devoted most of his negotiating energy to luring the center-left PS away from its NFP allies. Those negotiations even appeared to come to a standstill last week over Bayrou’s support for Retailleau’s immigration order. In the end, however, the PS announced that it would support Bayrou in the upcoming no-confidence votes, deeming that it had won enough concessions in his budget-cutting 2025 finance package. Although several MPs could break ranks — as seen in the January 16 confidence vote that followed Bayrou’s general policy speech — the mainline PS announced it would side with the government, out of what it called a “spirit of responsibility.”
The Rassemblement National, like the Parti Socialiste, abstained from the January 16 confidence vote. On Tuesday, it signaled plans to continue tolerating Bayrou’s government. “A no-confidence vote is not a toy,” its party president Jordan Bardella told reporters on January 27. However, Bardella also said that the far-right force views a new round of elections as inevitable come this summer, when President Macron will next be able to dissolve the National Assembly, twelve months after the last such elections.
Should he survive this week’s vote, how much more is Bayrou ready to give to keep Le Pen invested? On immigration, at least, he is reportedly opposed to letting his interior minister propose a new immigration law, fearing that debate around full-fledged legislation would divide his fractious minority coalition.
Partners in Bayrou’s government Les Républicains are currently vying for the adoption of a new bill to restrict birthright citizenship for individuals born in Mayotte, a French overseas département in the Indian Ocean. In December, Mayotte was hit by a devastating cyclone that dramatized the plight of the territory’s large population of undocumented immigrants from neighboring Comoros, which in turn fed calls for a clampdown on illegal immigration.
Bayrou has resisted right-wing calls for a national referendum on restricting immigration. But he defended Retailleau’s order, saying that the French public had a “feeling of submersion” by foreigners. That statement, aping the main narrative of the far right, had last week briefly interrupted talks between the Parti Socialiste and Macron’s camp. Between the center-left establishment and Le Pen, Bayrou wants to have it both ways. It seems like the Parti Socialiste will let him.