State Aid for Immigration? There’s Always More

ER Editor:  A recent report on mass immigration into France by the French Court of Audit, which is responsible for overseeing the use of public money and informing the public about it, shows a revealing mindset – that it considers mass immigration to be inevitable, that it can’t be controlled. Further, the report shows that the auditors (justices) fail to recognize the quintessentially political nature of immigration policy, that they believe it to be just some disembodied notion of ‘individual rights’ enshrined in international law and the French constitution.

The report also shows that the increasing influx of migrants into France is not at all based on any need within the country, and that estimates of the financial cost to the country are being officially lowballed.

France is now at the top of the list of European countries in terms of the absolute number of asylum seekers, ‘asylum’ now being the channel by which illegals can enter.

Those at the top of French State administration seem to have capitulated. Of how many other countries could the same be said?

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State Aid for Immigration: Always More! (Part 1)

PAUL TORMENEN, JURIST

The Court of Auditors has just published a report on “the entry, stay and first reception of foreigners in France”. The figures are indisputable: spending on immigration has been rising sharply for several years, as has the number of foreigners entering the country.

While the institution created by Napoleon is responsible for ensuring the proper use of public funds and helping the political authorities take decisions, the Court of Audit’s advisers consider mass immigration to be inevitable, and the increasing cost of such immigration must be borne in mind.

The publication of a report by the Court of Auditors is often an event. This institution has at its disposal a wide range of both quantitative and qualitative research resources which make it possible to assess the various state expenditure budgets. In the report published on 5 May on the cost and effectiveness of France’s migration policy, the Court of Auditors’ advisers do not confine themselves to checking the proper use of public money and proposing ways of making savings (1). They maintain a deleterious ideology which considers that controlling the entry of non-European foreigners is a pipe dream. This at a time when immigration is more costly than ever and endured in this period of economic stagnation.

Given the importance of the report both in terms of the themes covered and the recommendations, our critical analysis will be the subject of four articles, the themes of which are as follows:

1- General presentation of the report
2- Regular immigration
3- Illegal immigration
4- Measures of access to rights, integration measures and naturalization

1- General presentation of the report

The mission of the Court of Auditors

The main mission of the Court of Auditors (CoA) is “to ensure that public money is well spent and to inform citizens about it”. Some of its reports have had an important impact in the past. The reasons are as much to do with the waste of public money that was pointed at as with the almost political recommendations made by the institution’s advisers (2).

This time, the report made public on 5 May contains very few “political” recommendations on migration flows. Immigration in France is essentially presented as a question of intangible individual rights that give any foreigner who meets the conditions the possibility of settling in our country. The CoA’s advisers echo the widely shared ideology among the ruling elites that immigration in France is largely out of control.

For example, in the draft budget bill for 2020, the government considers that “the evolution of asylum demand is an exogenous factor” (ER: meaning the factor is external) (3). The CoA reporters go even further when they state more generally about the legal entry of non-European foreigners into France (excluding foreign students) :

“… only a quarter of the first [residence] permits [editor’s note] granted are the result of a decision entirely controlled by the public authorities, the rest being the counterpart of individual rights protected by the Constitution and the international legal order, which the State can neither foresee nor restrict.“

This disembodied presentation of an immigration over which the public authorities have no control is not only totally erroneous, it is dangerous. Readers of the various monographs on the great replacement in Europe, published on Polémia’s website, have been able to see that countries’ migration policies are neither set in stone nor inevitable (4). Several factors condition its importance:

– national legislation and international treaties ratified by countries, as well as their more or less restrictive application;
– the material and financial conditions of the reception of foreigners, quickly compared by the latter, who carry out a real “benchmarking” (a comparison of conditions) between countries (5).

As a result, migrant flows are directed towards countries offering the most advantageous reception conditions. It is for this reason, for example, that Portugal is staying away from mass arrivals of non-Europeans (6 ).

Irrespective of the international treaties they have signed (Convention on the Rights of the Child, Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees), several European countries put a brutal brake on extra-European immigration after the migrant crisis in 2015 (Denmark, Austria, etc.). These examples show that the scale of migration flows depends on highly political decisions and not only on the corpus of rights, as suggested by the CoA advisors. Decisions that require courage and realism, qualities that the ruling class singularly lacks.

The scope of the report

The CoA advisers specify in the introduction that their mission on “policy on the entry, residence and first reception of foreigners in France” concerned the procedures and measures provided for by the Code on the Entry and Residence of Foreigners (CESEDA). It is nevertheless surprising that the report does not mention certain expenses borne by the State.

To cite just one example, the reception of “foreign minors” is not limited to their care by the departments (cost estimated at two billion per year, 50,000 euros per young person per year). The State participates financially in the sheltering and assessment of part of this “public”, which continues to grow completely out of control. Faced with financially asphyxiated departments, the State has provided financial assistance to the departments, which amounted to 34 million in 2019 (7 ).

The general assessment of the State’s immigration, asylum and integration policy

The CoA advisors note that despite eight laws since 2000, whose objective is to control immigration, the number of non-European foreigners entering France in 2019 has increased compared to 2010. To put this increase in immigration into perspective, the advisors compare, independently of all social, cultural and economic considerations, the annual entries of extra-Europeans into France (legal immigration, asylum) with those of the countries with the largest entry flows. The number of residence permits issued per 1,000 inhabitants would thus be 3.7 in France, 14.5 in Sweden and 12.1 in Germany in 2016.

This comparison is totally biased: the year 2016 coincided not only with the regularisation of large numbers of asylum seekers in Sweden and Germany, but also in 2017 with the beginning of a reduction in migration flows into these countries. More seriously, it leads to a minimisation of the growing flows of non-Europeans arriving in France each year, which correspond neither to a need in the economy nor to a demographic emergency.

Both the number of job seekers (5.4 million in the 1st quarter of 2020), the number of households benefiting from the RSA (1.88 million at the end of 2019), the number of young people neither in employment nor in training (963,000 in 2018), and the birth rate do not justify the level of immigration in France. In the midst of the activity restrictions imposed by the government, the young people who will enter the labour market in September 2020 risk being a real sacrificed generation. Under these conditions, do we need new entrants to the labour market or to the social benefit counters?!

The CoA’s advisors also totally dismiss the large immigrant and Muslim population present in France, as well as the accelerated partition of French territory, with lawless zones where the order of thugs or imams reigns in a subtle balance.

Another manipulation by the CoA advisors was the emphasis on the number of asylum seekers received per country per 1,000 inhabitants, which placed France in third place in Europe in 2018. However, at the time of writing their report, the CoA advisers had the first figures for 2019, which now place France at the top of the list of European countries in terms of the absolute number of asylum seekers (8).

The time is long gone when CoA advisers unofficially “leaked” that asylum had become a new channel of illegal immigration, “unsustainable in the long term”, before officially denying this politically incorrect but so realistic comparison (9).

In 2020, the Cambon Street institution (Court of Audit) has become more mellow. The authors of the report draw inspiration in their observations and recommendations from several recent reports that are part of the dominant immigrationist ideological trend. These include the following:

– the report, produced by eleven “experts”, addressed to the government on 21 January 2020, which recommends “simplifying” and “opening up” the right of residence for people “who are neither regularizable nor expulsible” (10);

– the parliamentary report delivered in June 2019 by two centrist MPs, which recommends developing assisted returns of illegal immigrants and putting the soft pedal on forced returns (11);

– the report by an LR and an LREM deputy, delivered on 22 January 2020, which recommends cleaning up the list of jobs under stress and developing labour immigration (12).

What these widely publicised documents have in common is that the current migratory invasion must be smoothed out without tension. A refrain that the Court of Auditors takes on board 100%.

The cost of immigration policy

The Immigration, Asylum and Integration mission would represent, according to the CoA, “a modest but increasing share of government spending”. CoA advisors also point to a “chronic under-budgeting” of this mission, particularly with regard to the allocation for asylum seekers.

This is a modest way of noting that, faced with increasing migratory flows, the government does not give itself the means to control them, and that it allows them to increase each year a little more.

In order to minimise the cost of State expenditure in this area, the CoA, never short of biased presentations of the figures, uses one indicator: the share of these in the gross expenditure of the general State budget. State expenditure on immigration and integration is estimated by the CoA at 6.57 billion euros in 2019, i.e. 1.41% of the gross expenditure of the general budget. However, councillors cannot ignore the fact that this expenditure is 48% higher than in 2012. Asylum would account for a third of this increase and state medical aid for a fifth.

The assessment provided by the CoA advisers of the cost to the State of migration policy is greatly underestimated. The method used to arrive at the result of €6.57 billion in fact overlooks many expenses. There are two reasons for this: the scope used to arrive at this figure and the underestimation of certain costs.

Scope chosen: as Paul Tremblais recently pointed out, the document used by the Court of Auditors to quantify the cost of migration policy for the French State, called “Document de politique transversale – Politique française de l’immigration et de l’intégration”, is singularly restrictive (13). It ignores many direct and indirect expenses, which contributes to a better acceptance of the massive immigration that we are experiencing.

Underestimation of certain costs: many studies have highlighted the underestimation by public authorities of the cost of immigration, particularly in terms of maintaining law and order and justice, the lack of efficiency in the school system, the reception of foreign students, etc. (14). (14).

It is therefore important not to be fooled by the €6.57 billion figure on the cost of immigration, which was highlighted by the media on the occasion of the publication of the Court of Auditors’ report.

Moreover, the cost of immigration is not limited to the State budget alone. As Jean-Yves Le Gallou recently pointed out on Sud Radio, it is much higher: the communes, departments, regions, Social Security, National Education, prison administration, etc., each contribute, to varying degrees, to subsidising the stay of foreigners in France (15 ). There are also hidden expenses linked to fraud, such as the 11.9 million people born abroad who are recipients of social benefits… whereas the INSEE only counts a maximum of 9.5 million (16 ).

By extending the scope of spending on immigration to other administrations, several reports have resulted in a figure that ranges from 40 billion euros per year according to the CEPII, the economic research service attached to the Prime Minister, in 2018 to 85 billion according to the Posokhow report in 2014 (17). This is better said in this period of budgetary scarcity.

It is therefore with many precautions that one must read the report of the Court of Auditors. Its advisers are a thousand miles away from the “zero-based budget” approach, which aims to allocate resources as efficiently as possible by “rethinking” each expenditure.

If, as we shall see both in terms of legal and illegal immigration and in terms of the other measures relating to the reception of foreigners, a few avenues for savings are outlined, the questioning by the CoA’s advisers of the ratchet effect of immigration, with each year bringing a greater flow of foreigners than the previous one, which is always more costly, is not for tomorrow… Unless the Court of Auditors’ team is diversified.

But above all, a radical change in migration policy is urgently needed, if the French are not to be driven into the wall.

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Original article 

Les dépenses pour l’immigration selon la Cour des comptes : toujours plus ! [Partie 1]