The new law on asylum and immigration was first to be presented this fall. Emmanuel Macron finally announced Thursday, September 15 before the prefects gathered at the Élysée that it was postponed to 2023, after a debate in Parliament. The text will be submitted “from the start” next year.
Regularly accused of immobility on the subject by the right and the extreme right, the President of the Republic has therefore decided to regain control of this sovereign file to break, by his own admission, with a policy that he describes as“absurd, both inhuman, and inefficient”. Ineffective because France has more illegal immigrants than many of its neighbours, says Emmanuel Macron; inhuman because, according to him, she welcomes badly, therefore she integrates badly. The Head of State therefore pleads for a reform of the right to asylum and wants faster procedures, including for deportation. A good immigration policy for a good integration policy, he defends. The two go hand in hand in his eyes.
“Much better” reception conditions in rural areas
During his campaign for re-election, he wanted to condition the granting of a long-stay permit to the success of a French language exam. He puts forward a new proposal: a mechanism for the distribution of foreigners received on French territory. He wants those who apply for residence permits and those who have obtained them to no longer be settled in the suburbs, in the neighborhoods which are already the poorest in the Republic, but rather in the regions which are in the process of being depopulated, as a priority. therefore in a rural area. “The conditions for their reception will be much better than if we put them in areas that are already densely populated, with a concentration of massive economic and social problems,” judges the President of the Republic.
The proposal is already electrifying far-right networks who see it as the “great replacement” in action when Emmanuel Macron defends “a tremendous opportunity to fight against rural desertification”.
After the presentation to the Council of Ministers last week of the orientation and programming bill of the Ministry of the Interior, which sets its means, Emmanuel Macron attacks the immigration component, a way of contradicting the right which accused him of want to postpone the file indefinitely.
In just over eight days, Emmanuel Macron has also put the unemployment insurance reform into orbit, with the key to variable rights depending on the health of the job market, the imminent pension reform and he has also launched its National Refoundation Council and announced a Citizens’ Convention on the end of life to decide on the legalization of assisted suicide, without excluding a referendum at the end. Always sensitive or contested subjects.
What to answer therefore also to those who in his own ranks began to confide in their fear of seeing their leader become “chiraquised”, a reference to the second term of Jacques Chirac considered dull and without major achievement.