French government wants new immigration bill in 2025, less than a year after the last one – Technologist

Immigration, as a political issue, is fated to a kind of law of series: On average, a law is passed on the subject every two years, and each one is built on the perceived failure of the previous one – even when its effects have yet to be felt. On Sunday, October 13, French government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon confirmed on BFM-TV that there would be a new bill on the matter “at the beginning of 2025.” The previous bill was signed into law on January 26, less than nine months ago, and some of its implementation decrees are still awaited.

“We’ll need a new immigration law,” declared Bregeon, citing that it was particularly to increase the maximum detention period for foreigners subject to an order to leave the territory to 210 days (compared with 90 days today). This measure was put forward by Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau in the wake of the death of Philippine, a student killed in a Paris wood on September 21. The main suspect in the murder, a Moroccan already convicted of rape, had been released from a detention center due to there being no prospects of him being deported to his country.

“We don’t rule out (…) putting in other provisions (…) useful for protecting the French,” added Bregeon. Since his appointment as interior minister, Retailleau has, on several occasions, expressed his desire to reintroduce provisions of previous immigration law that the Constitutional Council had rejected as being “legislative riders” – i.e. measures with no direct link to the original bill.

A text potentially containing censored provisions

During the parliamentary debates on that law, the right-wing senators – led by Retailleau, then-president of the Les Républicains (LR, right) group – considerably toughened up the government’s bill, introducing provisions such as the end of the automatic right to nationality for people born in France, national preference for access to social benefits, stricter access to student residence permits and family reunification, and reinstating the offense of “illegal residence.”

Keen to secure votes for its text, despite the risk of sowing division among its ranks, Macron’s coalition had sealed a deal with LR, and the government settled for a version of the bill containing articles that are “clearly contrary to the Constitution,” in the words of then-interior minister Gérald Darmanin.

In the space of a few months, and a dissolution, France has gone from a government that asked the Constitutional Council to “clean up” a bill that didn’t entirely suit it, to one that aims to pass a new law featuring, potentially, those same provisions. One that, to do so, has argued that “the judges’ rejection was based on criteria of form and not substance,” according to Bregeon.

You have 13.47% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.