Once again, Macronie takes out the calculator. Postponed several times, the immigration bill will be debated in the Senate next Monday, before its examination in the National Assembly in December. But the government does not appear any more advanced than in recent months.
In the absence of an absolute majority at the Palais Bourbon, the executive will need votes from outside its own ranks to have it adopted. However, the Republicans have already drawn a red line: article 3, which they do not want to hear about. What is it about ? And why is it causing a stir within the presidential camp? We take stock.
Article 3, what is it?
From the start of the five-year term, the executive insisted on the necessary “balance” of the future bill, through two components: tougher expulsions of foreign offenders and the regularization of immigrant workers in professions in shortage. This last idea came to fruition in article 3 of the text, which recommends issuing a one-year temporary residence card to undocumented foreigners, “on an experimental basis” until December 31, 2026. To obtain it, the latter must in particular prove that they have worked for at least eight months in sectors affected by “recruitment difficulties”, such as construction, catering or hotels.
“The LR elected officials, when they go to the constituency, realize that the baker needs to legalize the situation of a person who has worked at his home for years,” breathes Mathieu Lefèvre, Renaissance deputy. “It’s a pragmatic measure, which only concerns a few thousand people. Not voting for the text for this reason would be unjustifiable,” adds the elected official from Val-de-Marne.
Why does the measure make the right scream?
Very offensive on the migration issue in recent months, the leaders of the right continue to target this proposal. Like Bruno Retailleau. “This is a call for change that we cannot accept: if tomorrow, illegal immigrants who work are regularized, then there will inevitably be more candidates for illegal immigration! », defends the LR boss of the Senate in an interview with Point. “Gérald Darmanin will make more regularizations than the left has ever done: in 1981, there were 130,000 regularizations, he will beat this record! », added Olivier Marleix, boss of LR deputies, in the Parisian. The right therefore repeats that it will not vote for the text if the measure is not withdrawn.
Why is the government attached to it?
The standoff seems to be underway, because Gérald Darmanin confirmed this Monday that article 3 would be maintained, for the sake of “balance” for the entire text. But also to preserve his troops. “On immigration, LR is not the problem. We put our measures on the table,” says Pierre-Henri Dumont, LR deputy for Pas-de-Calais. “The problem is their internal divisions. The government knows that by removing Article 3, they will lose the majority in their ranks.”
Within the “left wing” of Renaissance, around sixty elected officials have made maintaining this article 3 a priority, under the leadership of Sacha Houlié, the president of the Laws Commission. To make matters worse, other Macronist members do not see it that way. This Sunday, the vice-president of the Assembly Naïma Moutchou (Horizons) torpedoed the famous measure, seeing in it “a form of encouragement to illegal immigration” in an interview with Figaro. Enough to complicate the government’s task…
A circular for solution?
For several weeks, the hypothesis has been gaining momentum. The government could extract article 3 of the bill to better slip the provisions relating to professions in shortage into a circular, therefore leaving it to the prefects to decide on future regularizations. “We must not be a fetishist of the legislative vector. The circular would not be absurd, taking into account the fact that the professions in tension are not the same from one region to another,” assures Mathieu Lefèvre, close to Gérald Darmanin.
Satisfactory for the right? An executive from the presidential camp sighs: “We are not going to repeat belly dancing at LR. That’s what we did on pensions, they got everything and, in the end, did it the other way around for us…”