Are the obligations to leave the territory down sharply? In any case, this is what David Lisnard, the mayor Les Républicains de Cannes and president of the Association of Mayors of France denounces: “Today we must all the same note that we have been deceivedhe says on RTL. In 2019, the President of the Republic said that it was necessary to reach 100% of the obligations to leave French territory for illegal immigrants. We were at 19% at the time, which means that 80% was not applied. We are down to less than 6%”.
In what David Lisnard says, there is truth, a bit of exaggeration and also a lack of context. First, the real one: Emmanuel Macron had indeed mentioned the objective of a 100% execution rate of the obligations to leave the territory for foreigners in an irregular situation. It is also true that we are very far from it, around 6% last year, according to a Senate report.
Except that we cannot say that it is solely the fault of the President of the Republic because this figure has experienced a very sharp drop from 2020. Year of Covid, confinement and closed borders almost everywhere on the planet. In short: the health crisis has greatly complicated returns. There were fewer scheduled flights, it also required a negative PCR test. Some countries have also taken advantage of the pandemic to tighten return conditions. Conclusion: because of the pandemic, the number of obligations to leave the territory actually executed has been halved.
Before the pandemic, the trend was rather upward in recent years with an execution rate around 15%. This figure remains nevertheless quite low and it is far from being new. “The causes are widely documented”, writes the report of the Senate which points in first, the issuances of consular pass.
Clearly, the countries which must receive their nationals do not issue this document, which slows down expulsions. This is the case, for example, of Algeria. In the first half of 2021, Algiers only gave 31 passes out of more than 7,000 requests. In response, France has decided in recent months to tighten the conditions for obtaining visas with regard to Algeria, but also Morocco and Tunisia to protest against these consular passes issued drop by drop.
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