TRUE OR FALSE. Are some 90% of asylum seekers rejected without being “never” expelled, as Louis Aliot claims?

While the British parliament adopted a law allowing the expulsion of migrants to Rwanda, the RN mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot assures that in France, 90% of asylum seekers “do not meet the criteria, they do not are never expelled. This is false, they are much less likely to be rejected. The number of evictions remains low.

At least five migrants, including a child, died during the night of Monday April 22 to Tuesday April 23, while trying to cross the Channel, departing from Wimereux (Pas-de-Calais). At the same time, the British Parliament passed a law allowing asylum seekers who had entered illegally to be deported to Rwanda. An initiative that the National Rally mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, views favorably. “Not all the asylum seekers we have are real asylum seekers”, he judges on TF1. “90% of them do not meet the criteria, they are never expelled, the advantage of the English system is that they will stay in another country.. True or false ?

Less than 60% of rejected asylum seekers

It is false to say that 90% of asylum applications are rejected. According to the latest data from the Directorate General for Foreigners in France, for the year 2023, around 57% of applications were refused. In detail, nearly 61,000 asylum requests were accepted, out of around 142,500 files registered with the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA). This result takes into account requests at first instance and all appeals. The synthetic protection rate, which allows requests to be smoothed over time, amounts to 44.6%.

We cannot say, as Louis Aliot does, that these rejected asylum seekers are not “never expelled”, even if in reality, the number of deportations at the border is low. Some rejected asylum seekers decide to leave the country on their own, others are financially helped by the State to return to their country of origin, and some finally obtain a residence permit in France in the meantime. The others, in an irregular situation, receive an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF).

Few obligations to leave the territory executed

The number of asylum seekers actually deported each year is not made public. The Ministry of the Interior communicates the total number of expulsions. But in a report published in January 2024, the Court of Auditors made its own calculation: over four years, between 2019 and 2022, 2,999 rejected asylum seekers were returned to the border. Some 2,999 forced removals out of a total of almost 140,000 rejected asylum seekers who had received an obligation to leave the territory over the same period. Which means that 2% of the obligations imposed to leave the territory are actually executed.

This gap between the number of OQTFs issued and those actually executed can be explained by several structural reasons, as highlighted in the Court of Auditors’ report. First, the authorities have difficulty identifying and finding irregular migrants. Then, when they are sent back to their country of origin, the country does not always agree to issue them a “pass”. In Pas-de-Calais, for example, a third of requests are successful, underline the Court of Auditors. Finally, expulsions must be concretely organized, most of the time by plane and this does not always succeed: airlines can refuse, migrants do not always show up for the summons, or the trip is canceled if the migrants put their life in danger.