The government has made it a weapon against illegal immigration. In fifteen years, the number of OQTFs (obligation to leave French territory) issued by prefectures has tripled. They are not always justified, testifies an official in this extract from “Additional investigation” on four letters which divide France.
OQTF… an acronym that you have heard a lot in the media, at the time of the murder of Philippine, 19, in September 2024, or that of Lola, 12 years old, in October 2022. Two cases in which the alleged criminals were required to leave French territory.
When a foreigner under OQTF is involved in a news item, certain media often highlight this information, transmitting in the population “the idea that these crimes could potentially or should have been avoided if the people had been expelled from the territory”, underlines Jérôme Valette, specialist in migration issues at CEPII (Center for Prospective Studies and International Information), interviewed by “Complément d’investigation”. As well as mentioning the origin “when it concerns foreign delinquency rather when it concerns French delinquency” can only increase “the perception of this link between immigration and insecurity”.
Is this correlation between foreigners under OQTF and delinquency a fantasy or reality? By calculating, on the basis of figures from the Ministry of the Interior, the share of these removal measures pronounced against foreigners convicted by the courts (it was 1.4% over the period from 2019 to 2022), “Addition survey” found that the vast majority of OQTFs, more than 93%, target foreigners with no history…
In Europe, France is the country which issues the most OQTFs: as many as Greece, Italy and Spain combined. In November 2022, Gérald Darmanin, then Minister of the Interior, called for the “systematic issuance of an OQTF when the issuance of a title is refused or an arrest is made”. For the year 2023, their number reaches almost 138,000 – it has almost doubled in ten years, unlike the execution rate, which went from 17% to 8.5%.
In the prefectures, this “politics of numbers”, as described by an official interviewed by telephone, would it push agents to refuse perfectly justified requests for residence permits? “We were made to understand that if the number of refusals could be a little higher than the number of agreements, that would suit everyone,” he testifies, adding: “We had to make sure we found the little thing that would prevent the person from having a residence permit.”
-So it would have happened to him “to take removal measures on people who worked regularly in France, on a permanent or fixed-term contract, because a document was missing”, he says, wondering about the interest “to pronounce an OQTF for a person who works and who integrates, which is what we ask of them when they come to French territory, knowing that this OQTF will never be executed, and that this person will undoubtedly continue to work, but irregularly…”
“The consequence, continues this official, This is because files are processed much more quickly and in a much less qualitative manner. For us, it's a file, it's no longer a person.”
The Court of Auditors itself does not say anything else, pointing to a 2024 “systematization of OQTFs has become a challenge for administrative communication” and a practice that “clogs up the prefectures, which can no longer make a qualitative analysis of the situation of each applicant, and sometimes issue OQTFs to people integrated into society”.
Extract from “OQTF, four letters that divide France”, to be seen in “Additional investigation” on January 23, 2025.
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