How to kill two birds with one stone? We are in the heart of summer, but the summer languor has not seized the government, which is working on its most burning issues. For months, a refrain has been constantly coming back from the mouths of the bosses: “We can’t recruit.” Although France is still far from full employment, business leaders in the catering, transport, construction, agriculture, security or personal services sectors are looking in vain for labor in four corners of France. At the same time, the “immigration” file is also at the top of the pile. An acrobatic subject for the executive, which wants both to show its firmness through measures to improve deportations to the borders, so as not to leave the field open to the right and the far right, and to give social guarantees to his left leg. An idea germinates: to introduce measures concerning economic immigration.
At the beginning of August, Gérald Darmanin set a first milestone in the columns of our colleagues from the Figaro : “We are quite ready to imagine additional quotas by profession or by sectors in tension.” In November, the Minister of the Interior announced, alongside Olivier Dussopt, the final version of the measure with the creation of a “stressed job” residence permit, within the framework of the Immigration bill, which will be presented to the Council of Ministers in February. The goal: to regularize immigrant workers working in sectors that are struggling to recruit. A device already exists, but it is a simple circular, which offers a great margin of interpretation to the prefects. “In the hotlines, we receive business leaders who try to regularize the situation of undocumented workers and who find themselves confronted with overly complex procedures”, says Sacha Houlié, deputy of the majority and president of the law commission. This new residence permit would be, according to the first information revealed by the government, valid for one year, and tested until December 2026.
© / Dario Ingiusto / L’Express
A measure far from resembling a massive use of foreign labor, as our German neighbors want to do. And that will not erase all of the recruitment difficulties in a snap of the fingers either. This device should rather make it possible to lubricate the complex cogs of the procedures for regularizing workers in an irregular situation and to relieve business leaders who are helpless in the face of a Kafkaesque administration, and who are sometimes forced to part with employees they do not fail to regularize, for fear of sanctions. The employers did not, however, step up to the plate to applaud the creation of this “job in tension” residence permit. With a few exceptions, such as Pierre Coppey, president of Vinci Autoroutes, in a column published in The world, or the Union of Hotel Trades and Industries (UMIH). “We have to put an end to this hypocrisy: if you stick your head in a restaurant or behind the palisade of a construction site, you quickly realize that people in an irregular situation are working, and you have to allow them to regularize their situation. more easily”, says starred chef Thierry Marx, president of the UMIH.
A checklist
Alongside these rare committed speeches, business leaders have tended to walk on eggshells in recent weeks. “It’s not up to the bosses to decide on migration policy […] it is a subject of debate for citizens, and it is up to politicians to do so”, carefully declared Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the leader of Medef. Some federations even opposed a closed door to us when we told them solicited on the subject… Within the employers’ organisations, the subject is indeed the subject of internal debate. “No boss wants to go to the front line, at the risk of being shot”, thus confided to us the boss of a big undertaking. A caution due to the political sensitivity of the subject of immigration. Indeed, it was enough for the far right to rage against this measure, a “call for air for additional immigration” , in the words used by Louis Aliot, the Rassemblement national (RN) mayor of Perpignan, and emerges from his cupboards the specter of an army of workers who would come to steal work and drive down the wages of “natives”.
A link, however, far from being established, as economists Emmanuelle Auriol and Hillel Rapoport remind us in a note from the Economic Analysis Council published in November 2021. If American work dated from the early 2000s pointed to a negative impact of the immigration on the employment and wages of natives, studies using French data have shown… the opposite! “Research shows that immigrants generally occupy less qualified or more qualified jobs than natives: they are therefore complementary”, points out Emmanuelle Auriol, also professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics.
Ditto for the negative impact on public finances: studies have shown that immigration has a neutral impact in OECD countries (between -0.5 and +0.5). The regularization of these undocumented workers could also improve certain tax revenues, because concealed work prevents the State from collecting social security contributions. “Despite the serious studies which show the positive contribution of immigration, the subject is eruptive, and the employers’ organizations do not necessarily have a sufficiently clear mandate from their base to be able to express themselves”, analyzes Stella Dupont , Renaissance MP and co-host of the working group on immigration.
But the divisions within employers cannot be explained solely for political reasons. For some unscrupulous entrepreneurs, the new residence permit could turn into a pebble in their shoe. Today, it is indeed the employers who must take charge of the regularization of their employees. With this new residence permit, the employee would be in control. “However, some rogue business leaders take advantage of the irregular work of undocumented migrants and this regularization system: they can impose harsher working conditions on them, pay them less, and even blackmail the regularization” , sighs Marilyne Poulain, former member of the confederal leadership of the CGT and figurehead for many years in the fight for migrant workers. The extent of the phenomenon is of course very difficult to quantify, and impossible to say exactly if these bad practices are answered… “But certain large groups also benefit from it through subcontracting or interim systems”, adds Marilyne Foal.
As a result, behind the scenes a battle is being played out over the definition of professions considered to be in tension. Some would like to escape it… and others ask loud and clear to be part of it. A list already exists, resulting from data milled by the Administration and adapted to the regional level. But some professions that have difficulty recruiting, such as in the hotel and catering sector, are not included. One track would be to use the percentage of foreigners occupying such a position. “This criterion is revealing: certain professions may not seem to be in tension in the statistics, because there are already many undocumented workers who occupy them, such as in cleaning or the hotel and catering industry. “, describes Marilyne Poulain. At the Ministry of Labor, the experts are looking at the subject in any case, and consultations will take place with the social partners. Because, in addition to the demands of employers, “we must both stick to the reality on the ground and not make the device too complex”, underlines Marc Ferracci, Renaissance deputy and specialist in the labor market. A high-flying exercise.