"The exceptional admission to stay (AES) route is not the normal route for immigration and access to stay. Targeting foreigners in an irregular situation, it must remain an exceptional route," wrote the minister in a three-page circular addressed to prefects and revealed by Le Figaro and of which AFP has had knowledge.
Bruno Retailleau is due to present this new circular, a promise of regularisations step by step, on Friday during a trip to Yvelines.
Taking a firm line on immigration, the LR minister has repeatedly announced his intention to review the Valls circular, which is supposed to set the tone for prefectures on the case-by-case regularization of illegal immigrants.
Little known to the general public, this circular has allowed since 2012 a foreigner in an irregular situation to request "exceptional admission to stay" for family, economic or student reasons. It is up to the prefect to accept it or not.
Employers who are struggling to recruit and want to regularize employees in order to avoid turnover, a school that is mobilizing for a family threatened with expulsion despite being well integrated into the village, students that a university wants to keep: these are all cases that the so-called Valls circular helped to resolve.
Although the Retailleau circular does not strictly speaking change the criteria for obtaining this "exceptional admission to stay", it clearly asks the prefects to tighten the screws on regularization.
Thus the Valls circular promoted a "lucid and balanced" immigration policy and ordered prefects to "take human realities into account" by insisting on the regularization criteria.
"Severity"
Bruno Retailleau highlights: "controlling migratory flows, in particular through the fight against illegal immigration, and strengthening the integration of foreigners in France constitute the Government's priorities."
He also insists on the adherence of the undocumented foreigner to the "principles of the Republic" including secularism but also mastery of the French language, which will be "appreciated favorably" by the justification of a French diploma or a language certification.
Excluded are foreigners who may pose a threat to public order.
In 2023, the circular allowed 34.724 people to obtain papers (+0.3% compared to 2022), according to data from the Ministry of the Interior: 11.525 for work reasons, 22.167 for family reasons, and a thousand with student status.
To be eligible, an undocumented worker must in theory have lived in France for at least three years and have at least two years of work.
But in the new circular which will soon be published, Mr Retailleau writes that "a period of presence of at least 7 years constitutes one of the relevant indicators of integration".
"We should not overestimate the legal scope" of this text, Gwenaële Calves, professor of public law at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, told AFP.
"Regularization on an exceptional basis is at the discretion of the prefect, this circular does not in any way modify the other methods of regularization established by law. A circular obviously cannot modify a law," adds the academic.
"The prefect retains a discretionary role, but his power of assessment is framed by this circular," explains Gwenaële Calves.
"This circular calls on prefects to be more severe, but for example the minimum of seven years of residence to be regularized on an exceptional basis can always be lowered if other elements of the file support this," she explains.
While in the Barnier government, the Minister of the Interior sent another tough circular to the prefects at the end of October demanding "results" for "the resumption of control of our immigration".
Planned by the immigration law promulgated at the beginning of 2024, the update of the list of professions in shortage in which undocumented workers can be regularized should be published "at the end of February", affirmed the Minister of Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, on Sunday.