During a visit on Tuesday to the Channel port of Calais, French President Emmanuel Macron defended his government’s planned reform of immigration laws and vowed that the authorities will prevent any attempt to resurrect the infamous and now razed makeshift migrant camp there known as “the Jungle”.
Calais, a magnet for thousands of migrants hoping to find clandestine passage to Britain, has for years been the focus of diplomatic and political tensions and a symbol of the failure of policies to cope with the huge migrant crisis that has swept Europe.
Macron’s visit was ahead of a summit meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday, when he is expected to demand that London contributes more to easing the crisis in Calais, both by accepting to receive more migrants and by further funding of security measures at the port.
The French president, accompanied by his interior minister, Gérard Collomb, gave a one-hour speech before an assembly of police and gendarmerie officers, in which he set out the main points of controversial new legislation on immigration that his government is due to be put before parliament, where it has a comfortable majority, before the summer recess. He has presented the reforms as a two-pronged approach in which asylum requests, which numbered more than 100,000 in 2017, are to be dealt with faster, while also fast-tracking deportations of so-called economic migrants.
At a press conference last week in Rome, where he met with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Macron defended the planned changes to the law. “Nothing in the policy being pursued by the government calls the right of asylum into question,” he said, “but asylum does not mean welcoming people indiscriminately.”
But the proposed legislation has drawn strong criticism from very diverse camps, including President Macron’s own allies. While the precise detail of the new measures has yet to be revealed, the broad outline points to a clampdown that will result in mass expulsions of those who fail to meet the requirements for asylum status.
Raphaël Pitti, a former doctor with the French armed services who has spent many years as a voluntary medic for humanitarian missions in war zones around the world, notably Syria, and who is a municipal councillor in charge of sanitary and social affairs in the town of Metz, eastern France, was one of Macron’s earliest high-profile supporters when the latter launched his presidential bid in 2016. In protest over the government’s policies towards migrants who he said were placed in conditions in France that were “unworthy of our republic”, he last month announced he was returning the Légion d’honneur the Macron government awarded him with last July for his humanitarian work. “It is preferred to relegate [migrants] to a status of shadows, in jungles [makeshift camps], in forests, in the mountains, even going as far as prosecuting those who might have the benevolent idea of rescuing them,” he wrote in an open letter to Macron published in French daily Libération on December 21st.
Patrick Weil, a prominent French historian and political scientist specialized in immigration law and a senior research fellow with France’s national centre for scientific research, the CNRS, denounced instructions sent out to regional prefects by the interior ministry in mid-December ordering the inspection of emergency accommodation shelters to root out migrants and asylum seekers with illegal status as a move that “no government since the second World War had dared to make until now”.
Writing in his regular column with French Catholic daily La Croix earlier this month, lawyer and writer François Sureau, who had helped redact the legal charter of Macron’s En Marche! political movement, also attacked what he called the “degrading” December circular sent out to prefects, arguing that, “we can wish for greater rigour, a more demanding and severe policy towards asylum” but that “we cannot make a policy out of inhumanity”.
Louis Gallois, former CEO of European aerospace and defence group EADS (now Airbus) who now heads the French federation of associations offering emergency shelter and administrative aid to those in situations of social exclusion, the Fédération des acteurs de la solidarité, joined the fray by declaring that offering migrants “unconditional hospitality is the honour of the [French] republic”.
Meanwhile, in an op-ed article published in French weekly news magazine L’Obs earlier this month, French author Jean-Marie Le Clézio, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2008, described the government’s intended clampdown on economic migrants as being “above all an insufferable denial of humanity”, asking: “Is it less grave to die of hunger distress, abandonment than to die from the blows of a tyrant?”
The outrage expressed by figures who are not associated with the Left is cause for concern for the government given the influence it might have on a broad section of public opinion, in a similar vein to the outrage, albeit it temporary, that was prompted by the horrific mass drowning of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, and notably the distressing pictures of child victims, symbolized by the photos in September 2015 of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose body was found washed up on a Turkish beach.
As a result, in an attempt to calm disquiet among Macron’s political camp, prime minister Édouard Philippe and interior minister Gérard Collomb, have recently multiplied meetings with Members of Parliament from Macron’s LREM (La République En Marche) party to justify the adoption of tougher measures towards migrants and also to pass on common arguments to present in public. The government also made a public show of consultation with NGOs and associations dedicated to defending the rights of migrants, who were invited to a meeting with the prime minister on January 11th to present the main points of the proposed new legislation. But the meeting, attended by around 30 different organizations, did little to appease the controversy. Louis Gallois spoke of their “disappointment” over the planned bill which he said represented “a very clear hardening” of measures towards migrants.
The previous day, more than 20 NGOs, including the French League for Human Rights, Doctors Without Borders and the Secours Catholique, filed a legal challenge with the Council of State, France’s supreme administrative court, against the interior ministry’s order that migrants with illegal status should be rooted out of centres offering emergency accommodation.
The government last week sent the NGOs a text outlining the main points of its proposed legislation (see below, available in French only), which announces a priority given “to reinforce the effectiveness” of expulsion orders, which includes the continued detention of a migrant if the authorities appeal a magistrate’s decision to free them and the tightening of conditions by which a migrant is granted a period of time to organize their voluntary departure from France.
Among other proposed measures is the prolongation of the maximum period migrants can be held in detention centres from the current 45 days to 90 days, which can be lengthened by a further 15 days in the case of a person challenging a deportation order. It also allows for the placing under house arrest of a migrant who has agreed to voluntarily leave France “in order to reduce the risk” of evasion, and to impose tighter rules on the terms of such house arrest.
While announcing the intention “to improve” the conditions in which asylum seekers are accommodated, this same part of the text includes the proposition of inscribing in law the substance of the contested interior ministry circular of last December, establishing an “exchange of information” about refugees and asylum seekers between the administrators of emergency accommodation and staff from the French Office for Immigration (an interior ministry agency). It also sets out the creation of a “national schema” whereby asylum seekers are separated more evenly among different regions of France. “An asylum seeker can be orientated towards a given region and be required to reside there,” it states.
The government says it wants to accelerate the processing of asylum requests by the French office for the protection of refugees and the stateless (OFPRA) and the French national court of asylum rights (CNDA), in order to more swiftly distinguish those who are “economic migrants”.
But the proposed measures also include extending the period of residence permits delivered in the name of “subsidiary protection” and for those who are “stateless” from one year to four years, while allowing for the families of refugee minors who have been granted asylum to obtain ten-year residency rights, including brothers and sisters as well as parents. Asylum seekers will also be offered the opportunity of applying for residency permits while waiting for their requests to be processed.
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- The French article on which this English version is based can be found here.
English version and additional reporting by Graham Tearse