Undocumented workers: the government promises to update the list of professions in tension “at the end of February”

The schedule is now known. 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 this Sunday the Minister of Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet . ” With (the Minister of the Interior) Bruno Retailleau, we are working on the issue of regularization of undocumented immigrants, since we have to sign a circular together,” she declared in an interview with France Inter/France Télévisions/Le Monde.

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

“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.

A few weeks after his arrival at Place Beauvau, Bruno Retailleau, returned to the Bayrou government, announced the rewriting of the Valls circular. This text 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.

“What I like with Bruno Retailleau, (…) we agree, we do not agree, but it is a form of backbone”, declared Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet about his colleague from Beauvau. “This is part of the search for compromise. We can have different political histories (…), but we can also agree on the need for order, security and sovereign justice,” she explained.