France to speed up migrant expulsions but make residency easier for some

France aims to speed up the expulsion of illegal migrants while making it easier to obtain residency permits for those who work in sectors struggling to find workers, the interior and labour ministers said in a joint interview published on Wednesday.

Over the past weeks the subject of expulsion orders for undocumented migrants has been at the heart of public debate in France, following the murder of a 12-year-old girl, for which the main suspect is an Algerian woman with no residency permit.

"If I had to summarise, I would say that we must now be mean to the bad guys and nice to the good ones," Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in a joint interview with Labour Minister Olivier Dusspot in Le Monde newspaper.

They described a bill due to be voted on in parliament in early 2023 that would include measures favoured by the right: making expulsions easier, eliminating protection for groups such as those who arrived in France as small children, and denying welfare benefits to those told to leave.

But the tougher stance would be mitigated by measures such as automatic renewal of residency rights for some of those holding long-term residency permits. It would become easier for migrants who work in sectors that struggle to hire staff to legalise their situation and obtain residency, they said.

Serge Slama, a public law professor at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, said having the interior and labour ministers discuss the policies jointly was an attempt to win wide support by showing it is a "balanced law".

There are already procedures to legalise the situation of workers in under-staffed sectors - a list was created in 2007 - but the process is not "dynamic enough to respond to real needs of businesses," Slama said.

Without a majority in parliament, the centrist government needs to convince other political forces to back their proposals to turn them into law.