Provided for by the immigration law promulgated at the beginning of 2024, the update of the list of professions in tension in which undocumented workers can be regularized should be published “at the end of February”, said the Minister of Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet on Sunday. “With Bruno Retailleau, we are working on the question of the regularization of undocumented immigrants, since we must sign a circular together,” she declared in an interview this Sunday with France Inter, France Télévisions and The World.
This text, expected soon, must tighten the admission criteria which enabled 34,724 people to obtain papers in 2023, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior. It must replace the Valls circular which, since 2012, allows a foreigner in an irregular situation to request “exceptional admission to stay” (AES) for family, economic or student reasons. It is up to the prefect to accept it or not.
“Region by region” mapping
A few weeks after his arrival at Place Beauvau, Bruno Retailleau, returned to the Bayrou government, announced the rewriting of the Valls circular. It allows prefectures to regularize some 30,000 undocumented workers per year through work or family reasons.
To be eligible, an undocumented worker must have lived in France for at least three years and have at least two years of work. There were 11,525 of them who benefited from it in 2023.
“The problem with the Valls circular is that it required the person in an irregular situation who was working to request authorization from their boss,” explained the minister. “What would be a real novelty today would be, thanks to the law, to be able to spontaneously request regularization without being in the hands of the boss,” she continued.
Our file on Immigration law
The Ministries of Labor and the Interior have mapped “region by region” the professions in tension, “all qualification levels combined”, explained Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, specifying that “engineers and master's students” represent “a third of economic immigration. Asked about the date of publication of the list of professions concerned, she indicated that she had “engaged with the social partners” at “the end of February”.
