2023-12-22 11:00:00
Lhe French like to eat fruit but they refuse to pick it. They dream of themselves as discoverers of the Covid vaccine but France attracts too few foreign researchers. Engineers, cooks, boilermakers, skilled construction workers… the labor needs are immense. The new immigration law, passed on Tuesday December 19, should promote the regularization of undocumented workers for professions in shortage. However, the government’s initial proposals for automatic issuance of “work in shortage occupations” residence permits, as well as immediate access to work for asylum seekers from the most at-risk countries, were not accepted. .
According to the text, “undocumented workers working in professions in shortage may be issued exceptionally, as today, with a temporary worker or employee residence permit. However, they will no longer be required to go through their employer to apply for this card. They will notably have to prove having worked twelve months (consecutive or not) during the last twenty-four months, having resided in France for three years and their integration. The prefects will have discretionary power to grant the title. This measure will be tested until the end of 2026.” For economist Emmanuelle Auriol, professor at the Toulouse School of Economics and co-author of a note on immigration in 2021 for the Economic Analysis Council, the elected officials who voted for the text “perceive immigration as a burden” even though it represents a godsend.
Point : What do you think of the final version of the immigration law?
Emmanuelle Auriol: It is a text which essentially aims to restrict immigration. Unfortunately, there is not much on labor immigration. The main problem is that elected officials perceive immigration as a burden whose costs for our country must be limited. This ignores everything it can bring to the French economy. Just look at the difficulties that the majority of companies encounter in recruiting. There are low-skilled professions concerned such as construction, catering and agriculture, three major sectors which employ immigrants. We can also mention the transport of people and cleaning in hotels. But there are also skilled professions in shortage, such as pharmacists. In the field of health, it is dramatic: whether it is nurses, doctors or caregivers. France will lack 100,000 people to care for dependent elderly people. People will die because they don’t have adequate care.
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There is a divide, which resembles that of Brexit. We are in a situation where rationality no longer has its place. France is going against the grain of economic needs and is making choices that it will later regret. We must of course take care of people in an irregular situation who commit crimes. But that has little to do with the fact that almost all, 95% of people who emigrate do so for economic reasons. We are wrong to want to deprive ourselves of immigration. Depriving yourself of its economic benefits is suicidal.
What do you think of the section of the text on foreign students?
It is also problematic. Take the Toulouse School of Economics where I teach. It is nineteenth in the Shanghai ranking and if it is one of the best economic research centers in the world, it is because there are lots of immigrants attached to it. Does France no longer want Marie Curie or Picasso? It is also very poorly placed in terms of attractiveness for international mobility, in twentieth place in general while we are the seventh economic power. The country has only granted around 12,000 talent passports in 2022 for this skilled immigration.
Take the race for Covid vaccines, from which we were surprised that our country was absent. It is no coincidence that the Messenger RNA vaccines were all invented by foreign researchers. In the United States, 30% of patents are filed by people of foreign origin, although they represent only 13% of the American population. Some 30% of business creators are also foreigners, just look at the Indians or French in Silicon Valley. This over-representation of entrepreneurs among immigrants is found everywhere except in France, which refuses work immigration.
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These are qualified people who have studied and often have doctorates. Add to this the fact that immigrating is a very risky operation, you are far from your family, etc. These immigrants are thus people who are capable of endangering their positions, who like risk, because they are ambitious, and they have the ability to manage this risk. I repeat: labor immigration, which is dominant on the planet, is not a burden. It’s a godsend. For example, Australia is now experiencing strong growth after changing its restrictive immigration laws. There is also another benefit of immigration: the bridges stretched in a globalized world. When you are an Indian in France, you will trade with India.
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No way. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics David Card answered the question of whether economic immigration creates unemployment in a given territory. Our elected officials reason without thinking about the economy, believing that it is about sharing a fixed-size cake. However, the French economy has been growing since the Second World War. We must therefore reason about a dynamic system, a growing cake.
David Carb studies the Mariel exodus when, in 1980, Fidel Castro let around 125,000 Cubans leave [considérés comme contrerévolutionnaires, ils sont embarqués au port de Mariel, à l’ouest de La Havane, en direction de la Floride, NDLR]. The American city of Miami is therefore experiencing a major migratory shock. The economist compares it, over time, with three other American cities of similar size. It then shows that in Miami, the migratory shock does not affect the unemployment rate or the level of wages. Better still, it contributes to boosting the growth of economic activity.
When we remove immigrants for jobs, we do not put French people in their place, they do not want to work in very difficult, poorly paid jobs with staggered hours, in particular jobs in tension such as picking fruit, washing in a restaurant at night or caring for dependent people. It is important to understand that a company that cannot find employees either closes, gives up on growing and creating business, or relocates. That’s less growth for our children.
There is also no reflection on skilled labor immigration. France should seek to have real management in the Canadian or Swiss mode, where 30% of the population is immigrant: half are highly qualified people, in the banking sector, in particular. The other half is made up of much less qualified workers in the personal service sectors.
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