Immigration law: the concern of undocumented workers

4 mins

In the Farinez’vous bakery, in the south of Paris, employees tidy up the shop, vacuum and wash before closing for a few days for the end-of-year holidays. Jeanne, who prefers not to give her real name, has worked here for two years. Arriving from Ivory Coast in 2019, she left a violent husband, found herself homeless for a while, before finding a stable job.

There new immigration law worries her deeply, because she has just submitted a request to the prefecture to renew her residence permit, after already months and months of administrative hassle. “ They canceled everything at the prefecture and told me to start from scratch “, she explains, upset. She was able to resubmit a file, but “ Now, I just learned that everything is changing “, she continues in tears. She ” avoid watching TV » for fear of hearing about this law which has prevented him from sleeping at night since Tuesday. Even more than before, she fears every morning of being stopped by the police on her way to work, and of being expelled.

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“It’s counterproductive from an economic point of view”

For her request to renew her residence permit, Jeanne had the support of her employer, Domitille Flichy, who runs three bakeries and employs twenty employees. “ We are an integration company, and we train refugees and migrants in bakery professions », specifies the boss. “ Many of the profiles we support are foreigners “, then this law ” makes our job even more complicated “, she believes, because it makes “ more fragile people who are already fragile », who will have even more difficulty planning their career within the company.

In France, nearly 9,000 positions for bakers and pastry chefs are not filled due to a lack of sufficient candidates. In the hotel and catering industry as a whole, the labor shortage is estimated at 250,000 people by professionals in the sector. This law “ is totally counterproductive from an economic point of view and does not resolve the security problem either. It’s just politics », Estimates Domitille Flichy, like many business leaders, opposed to this law.

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“We work, we must have rights too”

With this text, migration quotas will be established and people who work without having a residence permit will have to prove over the last two years one year of work in a profession in shortage to hope to be regularized, compared to eight months today.

Makorani Savane, 26, works in a tea room. She arrived from Ivory Coast in 2014, and obtained her baccalaureate in France, then a diploma in hospitality. The young woman would have liked to work in banking, and had landed an internship at BNP Paribas, but due to a lack of a residence permit, she was unable to do so or obtain her diploma. She filed a request for regularization in July, and she finds this law unfair.

“ We work, we contribute and then we have no rights because we do not have a residence permit », she regrets. The new law plans to restrict the granting of social assistance – family allowances or even housing assistance – for people in an irregular situation. “ I hope that everything goes well and that the whole law does not pass. We cross our fingers and we wait », she concludes.

The Constitutional Council has been seized and its members have one month to examine the text and possibly censor the passages which are not in conformity with the Constitution. Last year, nearly 10,000 people working in shortage occupations were regularized in France.

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