Tribune. In the current electoral context, the migration issue is the subject of manipulations, fears and fantasies. One cannot be too careful in reading the facts and interpreting the figures.
In December 2021, the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII) published its 2020 report on applications for residence permits for the care of sick foreigners. The overall approval rate is equal to two thirds of the requests.
However, this rate should be interpreted according to the share of first requests and renewals, the latter being the most numerous: the number of first requests continues to fall. As for requests for stays for psychiatric care, they fell from first place in 2017 to fourth place in 2020. While more than 8,000 requests were recorded in 2017 with 73.5% refusal, their number had fallen to 4,144 in 2020, with 64.7% refusal.
Why such a drop, when the number of arrivals from countries at war or following extreme violence remains high? In 2020 according to the OFII, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) represented 31.7% of requests for treatment for psychiatric disorders. However, only a quarter of the opinions of OFII doctors are in favor of it. Thus, these requests are much less heard than those for other diseases.
Legal and practical obstacles
The asylum and immigration law of September 10, 2018 imposes that newly arrived migrants who apply for asylum jointly apply for residence for care if they are ill. However, the average duration of presence on the national territory when the first application for residence on the grounds of PTSD is submitted is several years, and the latter is often the result of people who have been refused.
Contrary to what the OFII suspects, this duration does not testify to the maneuvers of which asylum seekers would be capable of trying to obtain a residence permit, but rather to the fact that newcomers can only specify their problems very long following their arrival. The files must be motivated by doctors, but access to care is hampered by the proliferation of legal and practical obstacles – difficulty of access to state medical aid (AME), dematerialization of procedures, etc. –, aggravated by the health crisis.
To see attempts at “fraud” there reflects an error in reasoning and human psychology. Anyone working with exiles shares this observation: the rejection of asylum by the administration constitutes violence; the rejection of a request for care represents a new violence, psychologically devastating, because it is understood by the exiles as a refusal to hear their distress and their psychic suffering.
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