The French president, Emmanuel Macronpromulgated in the last hours a new immigration law behind the veto imposed by the Constitutional Councilthe body that guarantees that regulations are in accordance with the Constitutionto an earlier version with tougher measures included by the right in the Parliament.
The text, whose 35 articles were totally or partially modifiedwas approved on Friday and published this Saturday in the Official diaryreported the AFP news agency.
He Constitutional Council had censored several provisions of the law included by insistence of the right for, among other things, restrict access to social benefits and tighten criteria for family reunification.
The final text, however, maintains the structure initially sought by the Government, with a large section on the simplification of expulsion procedures for foreigners who have committed a crime, one of the objectives of the Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin.
An article on the regularization of undocumented workers in professions with few staff, which was the center of the debate in recent months, remains in the text validated by the Council.
The creation of the crime of irregular stay, the tightening of access to social benefits and the establishment of annual immigration quotas are outside the law.
Articles that referred to the restriction of family reunification and the imposition of a deposit on foreign students as a guarantee of their future departure from the country were also removed.
The right-wing Republican party denounced a “democratic robbery” and a “coup of the rule of law” by the court.
Laurent Wauquiez, possible Republican candidate for the 2027 presidential election, proposed to Parliament that the legislative body be the one that has “the last word.”
Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right National Rally party, called the ruling a “coup by the judges with the backing of the President.”
He called for a referendum on the immigration issue as the “only solution.”
For his part, the president of the Senate, Gerard Larcher, of the Republicans, urged the Government to “represent a text in accordance with the agreement” between legislative forces.
But the Minister of the Interior, Darmanin, went ahead and assured that the Government “will not present a bill” on the issue.
In turn, the radical left deputy Manuel Bompard, asked to withdraw the law, considering that “the text validated by the Constitutional Council corresponds to the text rejected by Parliament”, which is why it has “no legitimacy.”
Source: Ambito
