Restriction of the granting of visas, “police” management of immigration, tightening of access for foreigners to healthcare … The parliamentary commission of inquiry (CEP) on migration does not spare government policy. In its report published Tuesday, November 16, it makes thirty recommendations for “find pragmatic and human solutions” to immigration. This document is the result of six months of hearings and field work carried out by the deputy Sébastien Nadot (Libertés et Territoires) and the deputy Sonia Krimi, from the left wing of LREM.
The authors advocate in particular the establishment of a “true European asylum”, with the creation of an agency on a continental scale which will “better recognition of decisions and harmonization of criteria”. She believes that “the French Presidency of the European Union from 1er January 2022 should allow “to carry this proposal with force”.
Noting that the government tightened the conditions of access to health care for exiles in 2019, the committee recommends removing the three-month waiting period so that asylum seekers can immediately benefit from universal health protection. She also insists on the “need for an initial health check-up for newcomer foreigners“and recommends opening new jobs to foreigners, in particular non-Europeans, in certain technical positions in the civil service.
The government also announced at the end of September that it had massively reduced the number of visas granted to Maghreb nationals, to force these countries to issue more consular passes in order to increase expulsions. CEP, for its part, calls for “do not penalize the populations by a drastic reduction in the issuance of visas”. In Calais, where the government had to send a mediator at the end of October to demine a crisis symbolized by the hunger strike by activists, the report invites “end the ‘zero point of fixation’ policy”.
This document, which is unlikely to be taken up by the executive five months before the presidential election, proposes a reform of the management of the migration issue, which according to the commission must leave the bosom of the Ministry of the Interior to “to go beyond the police management of immigration alone”. It therefore proposes the creation of a high commission for immigration to the Prime Minister, which would have an interministerial scope.
“I cannot ask the Ministry of the Interior to do what it does not know how to do, that is to say housing, integration, work … We have to come back to a vision a lot more peaceful. “
Sonia Krimi, LREM deputy and rapporteurin press conference
With the proposal of a “migration policy in several ministries, you do not take the model of large migratory countries like Germany, you take the example of Greece: is this the model you want?”, retorted before the National Assembly the Minister of the Interior. Gérald Darmanin also stressed that the State was spending four million euros per year on food distributions in Calais: “I don’t call it state harassment”.
The recommendations of the commission “come down (…) to a unraveling of the current steering of the migration policy of our country, on the grounds that, under the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, it would have an overly security orientation”, regrets for his part the deputy of the North Vincent Ledoux (Agir), the only parliamentarian to have abstained during the vote on the report to the committee. The deputy deplores a “impressionistic addition of propositions” without “no overall and quantified assessment of financial and human resources” devoted to immigration.