Regularization of undocumented immigrants: “the entire majority is committed to this measure”, assures Véran

"You have part of the majority which says 'we are committed to this measure'. Very good. It turns out that the entire majority is committed to this measure, it is the one which allows foreigners who work in our country, who have already been there for a while, who have a salary and who can support their family, to ask themselves to be regularized when they are irregular", declared the minister on Cnews-Europe1.

He responded to a column published Monday evening in Libération, signed by around thirty deputies and senators from the left and the center.

It includes members of the left wing of Macronie, who seek to influence the government so that it does not give in on this point to the demands of the right, fiercely against it. “To get this bill voted on, we need to expand the majority,” Renaissance MP Sacha Houlié explained on France Inter, calling for “a move away from hypocrisy”.

Among the right-wing deputies, some "can recognize that employers ask them for papers for their workers" and "this can justify abstentions", added the president of the Laws Committee of the National Assembly.

But at this stage, the Republicans promised that they would vote against the text if the regularization measure was maintained, or even that they would table a motion of censure in the event of passage by 49.3.

“I am not afraid of bringing down this government”, affirmed on Sud Radio the head of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, insisting that “an illegal worker has no vocation to stay in France” and predicting that in state, the bill "will be a new suction pump" for immigration.

Point of view refuted by Mr. Véran. “Those who sell you a call for air linked to immigration law are lying to you,” said the government spokesperson.

“We are talking about a few thousand people,” he added, citing as an example Germany “and even Denmark” whose birth rates are falling and which “today structure the arrival of foreigners by saying +if you come to our country, you take a job and you participate in the economic activity of our country+”.

Refuting a direct link between the riots and immigration, he responded with the link with "working-class neighborhoods", citing "poverty, misery, crowding in dilapidated housing" but also "school dropouts", single-parent families, “an integration that has been failed for decades in our country”. Among the rioters, he insisted, there was only a “minority” of “new arrivals and people who are foreigners”.