22-12-23, 08:33
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#42
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re: Brit Fishermen & Cabbie Rage-French Tow Migrants Back-Why Can't We?
In Pandering to The Far Right on Immigration, Macron Has Handed It a Victory.... Take Note Britain
Desperate to fulfil a campaign promise, the French President has accepted an impractical, repressive bill praised by Marine Le Pen
The Guardian 22 DEC 2023
Her longstanding demands for putting ‘the French first’ had been enshrined in law, Le Pen said.’ Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen at the Elysee Palace.
Immigration derangement syndrome is causing havoc on both sides of the Channel, arriving in France this week in the form of a titanic row, not a small boat. The president, Emmanuel Macron, is accused by the French left of accepting an immigration law so repressive that it has been applauded by Marine Le Pen.
The leftwing politician Manon Aubry called it “the most racist law we have seen” in France. She had presumably never heard of the Vichy regime. The health minister, Aurélien Rousseau, has resigned over it.
Of what is Macron accused? Is the French president sending asylum seekers to North Korea? Building a wall along the Franco-Italian border? No. But on Tuesday night, a raft of centre-right amendments turned a much delayed and relatively anodyne government immigration bill into a laundry list of rightwing slogans.
Most of those amendments are unpleasant and pointless rather than nasty. They are impractical gestures to appeal to hard-right opinion, similar to but not as extreme as the UK government’s Rwanda policy. The automatic right to French nationality of children born in France with two foreign parents becomes slightly less automatic.
It was never fully automatic before, unlike, say, in the US. A five-year delay will be imposed before some legal migrants can claim social benefits such as family and housing allowances. This is discriminatory but already applies to other social benefits introduced by leftwing governments.
Several of the changes to the bill will almost certainly be deleted by France’s constitutional watchdog, the constitutional council. Macron and his government accepted them knowing they would not stand. This was motivated by a mixture of tactical desperation and cynicism (also reminiscent of the UK).
The far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, saw her chance. After condemning the bill and the amendments as too feeble, she stood on her head and announced it was an “ideological victory” for her party. She and the other 87 Rassemblement National deputies, who opposed the law on Tuesday morning, voted for it en bloc on Tuesday evening.
Her longstanding demands for “national preference” and putting “the French first” had been enshrined in law, Le Pen said. This is atmospherically true but factually a lie. Even the amended bill goes nowhere near the kind of discriminatory measures demanded by Le Pen, such as jobs reserved for French citizens and fees for foreign children attending state schools.
There was already anger at the amended bill on the left side of Macron’s centrist party and coalition. The fact that Le Pen was voting for the bill turned that anger into misery and outright revolt. Of the 251 Macron-supporting deputies, 59 – almost one in four – failed to vote for the law as copiously amended and extended by the centre-right. After Rousseau resigned, several other ministers threatened to follow him but have not yet done so.
In a television interview last night Macron attempted a perilous balancing act. He disowned parts of his own law – such as a clause that will make non-EU foreign students pay a cash deposit before they can come to France.
He said that his minority government had been forced to compromise to rescue its original bill, which contained “real solutions to real problems”. He had asked the constitutional council to fillet the text of its worst excesses.
Macron’s original intention was to address legal and staffing problems that are preventing the country from blocking and deporting illegal migrants.
At present, 90% of those ordered to leave never do so.
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