Thursday, November 14, the departments led by the right and the center banged their fists on the table: they threatened to suspend the payment of active solidarity income (RSA) and to stop taking care of new unaccompanied minors ( MNA) if the government did not reverse the budgetary cuts planned for 2025. What do you think would happen? The Prime Minister, to calm the fury of the departments, proposed to replenish the coffers of the departments… by increasing the DMTO (Foreign Transfer Rights), incorrectly called “notary fees”. “ The right was for a long time the left without taxes, but today that is no longer even the case », noted Philippe de Villiers recently in front of the audience of the IFP (Institute of Political Training).
Let the State manage!
The finance bill for 2025 provides for “an effort” of 5 billion euros for communities, including two billion euros for the departments, which can no longer cope. “Today, unaccompanied minors, let the State manage and take care of them” declared Nicolas Lacroix (LR), president of the group of departments of the right, the center and the independents (DCI). You should know that the issue of unaccompanied minors is a hot potato between the departments and the State: the latter considers it the responsibility of child protection, and therefore of the department. The departments believe that, since it is a migration issue, it is up to the State to take care of it.
You should also know that since Macron's election in 2017, more than 100,000 minors have been taken care of by the departments. The year 2023 was a record year with the number increasing by 31%. Unaccompanied minors currently represent between 15% and 20% of the minors cared for by the ASE (Children's Social Assistance), which is now saturated. The annual cost per person is estimated between 36,500 euros by the Drees (Directorate of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics) and 50,000 euros according to the Assembly of Departments of France. To this we must add, for example, bone tests (1,500 euros), when the courts authorize them… and sometimes, legal costs: as Senator LR Valérie Boyer pointed out during a question to the Minister of Interior in 2023, these so-called unaccompanied minors are often victims of sexual or labor exploitation, domestic slavery, forced begging, they are forced or trained to commit crimes (in particular by drug traffickers)… and sometimes all of this at once. This simple and sad state of affairs should, in itself, push everyone to fight against this phenomenon, which has become an ordinary immigration channel, in the name of the Convention on the Rights of the Child signed by France: this states that a child has the essential right to live with his or her parents. Who would keep a foundling at home, at the risk of putting him in danger, without asking where he comes from, who his parents are, and without trying to get him back to his home? However, this is what France does, and many other Western countries elsewhere, which with a benevolent paternalism of neo-colonialist inspiration, consider themselves the moral duty to maintain and (poorly) raise the children of others .
Leaking forward right into the wall
The revolt of the departments could have been an opportunity for the Prime Minister to put the question of unaccompanied minors back on the table. Had he not just stated, on France bleue, that there was “ urgency to control illegal immigration » ? No. He chose the FADM (Flight Forward Straight into the Wall) strategy. To compensate for the hole in the fund caused – in particular – by unaccompanied minors, Michel Barnier proposes to increase notary fees by 0.5 points in 2025. Fees which do not go into the pockets of notaries, as their name suggests. does not indicate, but in that of the State and local authorities (in this case, the departments and municipalities). For the purchase of a property for 200,000 euros, the increase in transfer taxes would be 1000 euros more on the purchase, knowing that these “costs” cannot be financed by a bank loan, and must therefore come from the bottom of personal wool. That young households, for example, do not necessarily have.
This increase in transfer taxes for valuable consideration (DMTO) is of great concern to professionals in the sector, warning of a possible sudden halt to the (small) real estate recovery, particularly among first-time buyers. Who is thus targeted? The owner. Who will have difficulty fulfilling it? The middle classes. Once again, we refrain from thinking about the central subject – unaccompanied minors – to use the only solution that our leaders have known for decades: the milking of starving milk cows. The symbol, if we summarize it, is disturbing: it is the private money of land roots which will finance the public mismanagement of globalized uprooting. Let us finally add that calling at almost the same time for demographic rearmament is a cynical farce: it is not by dissuading young couples from building a nest and keeping them in rental insecurity that the State will encourage them to procreate. At the same time, Meloni's Italy and Orban's Hungary have made zero real estate loans for young parents among their first measures to encourage the birth rate.
Print, save this article as PDF
