Will France open up to immigration?

Nicolas Sarkozy won last year's French presidential elections on an anti-immigration platform designed to curry favour with the voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen's racist National Front. Since his election, he has tightened France's immigration laws. His talentless lackey of an immigrant minister, Brice Hortefeux, loves talking tough about how France will deport Africans who dare risk their lives trying to come work in France. What, then, are we to make of reports that the commission looking at how to boost the French economy set up by Sarkozy and headed by Jacques Attali, a confidant of the late Socialist president Mitterrand, plans to recommend an increase in immigration as means of revitalising the French economy?

Attali's logic is impeccable. Just consider how Britain, Ireland, Spain and Sweden have boomed in recent years, as migrant workers from Poland and the other new EU member states, as well as from further afield, have given their economies a new lease of life. Spain's foreign population has soared in recent years - and so has the employment rate among Spaniards. France and Germany, meanwhile, continue to fret about the threat from the much-maligned Polish plumber.

With France's growth slowing, its sclerotic labour market could do with an infusion of foreign blood - of hard-working, enterprising people who are willing to do the jobs that French people can't or won't. In so doing, they would create new jobs for French jobs, both through their increased spending power, and in complementary lines of work. France's economy would grow faster - a priority for Sarkozy and voters.

Although Sarkozy is notoriously erratic and opportunistic - a political jackdaw, rather than a man of principle - it seems unlikely that he will perform an about-turn on immigration. But here's hoping that when Attali presents his report to Sarkozy on 23 January, the president sees sense.

A Pyrrhic 'victory' for France's Socialists

It is a measure of how low expectations have sunk that France's Socialist Party (PS) is celebrating after winning scarcely more than a third of the seats in the country's newly elected National Assembly. Pollsters had been forecasting electoral oblivion; instead, the PS merely received a drubbing at the hands of President Sarkozy's victorious UMP.

In the near term, Sunday's results are good for democracy: every government needs a strong opposition to hold it to account and curb its excesses. When opposition in parliament is puny, critics are more likely to take to the streets instead.

Paradoxically, though, the Socialists' relative success may harm their longer-term electoral prospects. Had the PS done disastrously badly, the pressure for reforming the party would have been overwhelming. It would have been easier for it to follow in the footsteps of its counterparts in Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain and become a modern - and thus electable - social-democratic party, along the lines suggested by Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

There is still hope. But Sunday's results risk fostering the delusion that an unreformed PS can win in 2012 and thus help the party's dinosaurs to stifle much-needed change.

A Socialist ought to have been a shoo-in for the presidency this year. With President Chirac discredited after 12 years in office and the outgoing UMP government deeply unpopular, French voters were aching for a change. Yet it was Nicolas Sarkozy, a long-time minister in that administration, who seized the mantle of change, while Ségolène Royal stumblingly embodied the status quo.

The Socialists have not won a legislative election since 1997, a presidential one since 1988. The Left's combined share of the vote in the first round of this year's legislative election was its lowest since the Fifth Republic began in 1958.

It would be a big mistake to intepret the second-round bounce as a Socialist revival. More likely, it reflects voters' second thoughts about granting the UMP a crushing majority, combined with fears about the new government's ill-timed and poorly explained proposal to hike VAT.

If the Socialists are to stand a chance of winning power again, they must embrace reform. The long-term health of French democracy depends on it. After the marginalisation of François Bayrou's centrist Modem party, only a modernised Socialist Party can pose a viable alternative to the UMP.

Illegal immigrants discovered doing up French president's residence

Immigrants from Mali with fake residence permits have been discovered working at one of President Sarkozy's official residences.

The company that hired the foreign builders, who have been working for it since 2004, says it was unaware their IDs were fake.

Policemen guarding the residence of La Lanterne, where Cecilia Sarkozy plans to live, recently realised the IDs were fake.

The Malian immigrants are apparently to be deported, according to France 2 TV news.

They were good enough to do up the French president's house, it seems, but not good enough to be allowed to stay. Shame.

Hortefeux's vile hypocrisy

As a French frigate returned the bodies of 18 drowned African migrants it had fished out of the sea near Malta, France's new immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, was full of fury.

Not, of course, at the immorality of Europe's border controls, which cause so many unnecessary deaths, but at the people-smugglers he holds responsible.

Of course, there are some nasty characters who profit from people's despair. But the only reason people need to resort to them in the first place is because it is impossible for Africans to come work in Europe legally.

Such vile hypocrisy from Hortefeux - and indeed from his boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, who must thank his lucky stars that France was more welcoming to his foreign father than he now is to others trying to cross borders in search of a better life.

France relives deportation horror

Anyone in the US, Britain or elsewhere who believes that expelling people is an easy way to reduce illegal immigration  should read this excellent article in Saturday's Guardian about France's flailing drive to deport illegal immigrants. In a chilling echo of the Second World War, when many brave French families hid Jews from the Gestapo, their descendants are giving refuge to the sans papiers that interior minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to deport. 

Sarkozy clearly has no chance of expelling more than a handful of the 300,000 or so illegals believed to be living in France, but his crackdown is still causing immense suffering, as families are broken up, shuttled around, and made to live in constant fear. But then his real aim is not to throw them all out: it is to curry favour with far-right voters in next year's presidential election.

A similar noxious logic applies in tomorrow's US Congressional elections. Vulnerable Republican candidates do not seriously believe that the US can stick all the country's 12 million illegal residents in cattle carts and send them south, but threatening to do so should still win them some crucial votes and give them a glimmer of hope of clinging on to power.

A hollow victory for the French Left

The protesters claimed the revolutionary mantle of 1968, defying the government and symbolically occupying the Sorbonne. President Chirac, rightly described by Jon Henley as having achieved nothing of substance during his long tenure in office, stood firm to his principles: when the going gets tough, cut and run to save your skin. Yesterday's climbdown by Chirac's prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was therefore entirely predictable. The only surprise is that Chirac endured two months of plummeting poll ratings before finally buckling to demands from students and trade unions that a new youth employment law be withdrawn.

The leader of the Socialist party duly greeted "the climbdown by the powers-that-be". The Communist party hailed it as "a great victory for the people". But it is nothing of the sort. Yes, the street won, but the people on the street were privileged insiders defending their vested interests, not a popular uprising of the dispossessed. As I noted in a previous post, although the government's proposed "contract of first employment" was half-baked, the protesters do not have right on their side. They are set against the root-and-branch reform that France is crying out for - and buoyed by their latest victory they are in a stronger position than ever to resist change. Under the egalitarian pretence of job security for all, the French system that the protesters defend swells the ranks of the long-term unemployed and the permanently excluded, creating an economically wasteful, politically fractious and morally distasteful underclass.

With the mainstream and even the extreme left fighting for the interests of one set of insiders against another, the true outsiders in French society have no champions, and scarcely even a voice. In that respect, they are worse off than the American underclasses at whose plight the French recoil in horror. The desperate rioting that spilled over from France's suburbs last year provoked fear and loathing, not understanding and reform. So even though the left has won its latest bunfight with the right, the real losers are those on the margins of society that the left ought to be fighting for.

France's misguided protests

Over a million people took to the streets of France on Tuesday in protest at prime minister Dominique de Villepin's proposed new employment law, with another national strike called for next Tuesday. Students and trade unions are bitterly opposed to the plans to make it easier for companies to hire and fire young workers. They see it as an assault on young people's right to secure jobs, but de Villepin says it is essential to reduce France's youth unemployment rate of 22%. Both sides are wrong.

As the presence of hundreds of thousands of young French people working in London and the South-East amply testifies, the French economy is failing to produce enough jobs. There are two main reasons for this. The first is the heavy burden of taxes on labour, which causes companies to economise on it as much as possible - witness how understaffed restaurants in France are. The second is rigid job-protection laws, which make it very hard to fire staff, even in a downturn. The combined effect is security for those in work, but at the cost of high unemployment, predominantly among the young and the socially excluded, such as those living in the suburbs that erupted in riots last year.

De Villepin's new "contract of first employment" is a half-baked attempt to mitigate the harm done by France's rigid and burdensome labour laws. It would allow companies to take on young workers without promising them a job for life: during a two-year trial period they could fire them again at will. This would probably do some good at the margin: it would make companies more willing to take the risk of hiring unproven young people, who would thereby gain some valuable job experience. But it would be unlikely to have much of an impact on unemployment, since it would do nothing to lower the cost of hiring workers or the burden of holding on to unneeded older staff. And it creates a perverse incentive to hire young people for just under two years and then fire them in order to stop being stuck with them forever come what may.

But the protesters do not have right on their side either. For a start, if the law creates even a few new jobs, surely this is better than long-term unemployment? While it makes sense for trade unions, who represent the cosseted insiders lucky enough to be virtually unsackable, to resist any erosion of job protection laws that might one day harm their members, to do so on the principles of equality and solidarity with the (jobless) young is hypocritical humbug. In opposing a measure that would benefit them somewhat, the students either do not understand the causes of France's high unemployment or calculate that they will eventually be insiders too, for which a few years of unemployment may be a price worth paying. The opposition of France's suburban underclass, who potentially have most to gain from getting a foot on the job ladder, suggests a profound despair that the system is rigged against them regardless.

French history and President Chirac's record both suggest that the government will eventually cave in to the protesters. But de Villepin's presidential rival, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, has suggested a better way forward: a broader overhaul of the country's labour laws, with a new employment contract offering job security that increases steadily with tenure. Combine that with a shift in the burden of taxation from labour to environmental "bads", and France could finally make a big dent in its dole queues. Anglo-Saxon deregulation it wouldn't be, but a big step in the right direction even so.

French myth-making

Many French people rejected the constitution because they regard Brussels as the handmaiden of "ultra-liberal" Anglo-Saxon capitalism, intent on deregulating markets and opening up the French economy to competition. Just look, they say, at the EU's proposed services directive, which would tear down barriers to trade in services, or at the eastward enlargement of the EU, which has exposed French workers to competition from low-wage, low-tax economies such as Poland. The upshot, they claim, is that the EU is driving social standards down and pushing unemployment up.

This is mostly nonsense. Start with the blindingly obvious: an organisation whose biggest budget item is the common agricultural policy, which shovels vast subsidies to European farmers (many of them French) and imposes swingeing taxes on foreign food, is not "ultra-liberal" by any stretch of the imagination. Europe is not even a free trade zone. Although most barriers to trade in manufactured goods have been abolished, vast swathes of the European economy remain segmented along national lines. Europe's single market does not encompass its many service sectors—such as finance, media, law, construction, health, education and energy—which account for 70 per cent of the European economy and a similar proportion of its jobs. Far from being ultra-liberal, the EU is only semi-liberal.

But the French were right that Europe was edging in a liberal direction. The admission last year of ten new member states, most of which are less interventionist than France, has boosted competition somewhat, although since they account for less than 5 per cent of the total EU economy their impact on France has not been huge. And had Jacques Chirac not blocked it back in March, the EU's services directive would have exposed the French economy to more competition. Workers in uncompetitive sectors would have suffered, but consumers, exporters and the economy as a whole would have gained.

Yet even the completion of a true single European market stretching from Lisbon to Latvia would not imply a "race to the bottom" of taxes and standards. It is simply not true that factories and jobs are inevitably lured to countries with the lowest taxes and regulations, pressing down on standards in France. For a start, many services—such as haircuts, childcare and nursing—can only be provided locally. Moreover, taxes and regulations are only one factor among many that determine where people work and companies establish themselves. Although France's high taxes and regulations may deter some, its well-educated workforce, excellent infrastructure, geographical position, quality of life and membership of the euro will attract others.

International competition does not necessarily drive taxes and standards down. France's tax revenue accounts for around half of its economy—just as it did ten years ago. Indeed, in some European countries, taxes are rising. Over the past three years in supposedly ultra-liberal Britain the government's tax take as a share of the economy has risen by two percentage points—and is set to rise by a further point over the next two years.

Nor can Europe, still less EU enlargement, be blamed for France's high unemployment. France's jobless rate has been high for over 20 years, long before even the creation of the single market in 1993, much less last year's EU enlargement. Moreover, within that European single market, jobless rates vary from 4.6 per cent in Austria to 12.3 per cent in Belgium, so there is nothing inherent in the single market that prevents France from creating jobs.

The truth is that the main fault for France's enduring high unemployment lies at home: its outdated product and labour market regulations discourage companies from hiring workers and make it costly for them to adjust to changing tastes and technologies. Does this mean that France has to deregulate its economy, and embrace ultra-liberal Anglo-Saxon ways, in order to get unemployment down? No. Far from blaming Europe for its travails, France ought to be looking to successful European social democracies, such as Denmark and Sweden, to solve its problems. The Nordic countries have thriving economies that combine high standards for working conditions with low unemployment. Without too much pain France could enjoy similar success.