Interior Minister Claude Guéant is to issue a new circular next week specifically to cover employment of highly qualified foreign students. The move follows criticism from academics, employers, students and politicians over tightened restrictions on professional immigration that led to many non-European Union graduates being refused permission to stay and work in France.After a meeting on Wednesday with higher education leaders, ministers announced that the police authorities responsible for dealing with visa and work permit applications would next week receive the new circular giving directions applicable to the specific situation of foreign graduates with at least a masters degree who wanted to acquire their first professional experience in France.
But student, educational and anti-racism representatives rejected the ministers’ latest proposals, and promised to continue their opposition until the restrictions were withdrawn.
A previous circular published jointly by the ministries of the interior and of employment on 31 May 2011 required administrative authorities to treat applications for work permits, especially those from students, more rigorously. Guéant, its principal proponent, insisted that the circular merely repeated existing laws on the rights of foreigners to work in France.
But the three bodies representing presidents of universities (CPU), grandes écoles (CGE) and engineering schools (CDEFI), as well as employers’ organisations, expressed anxieties when thousands of foreigners who had studied in France – and who would previously have been hired by French companies keen to use their employees’ ‘double culture’ and language skills for their international activities – were refused residence and work permits.
Students’ and lecturers’ unions demanded withdrawal of the circular, and employers called for flexibility in its application.
Laurent Wauquiez, minister for higher education and research, and his predecessor Valérie Pécresse, stressed the government’s wish to attract talented foreign students to educate a future international elite.
Prime Minister François Fillon wrote to the CPU, CGE, CDEFI and the employers’ Association Française des Entreprises Privées in November, assuring them that France was “extremely attached” to its tradition of educating foreign students and that he had ordered a reexamination of some cases where graduates had been refused residence permits.
Students stepped up their demands for cancellation of the circular, and a petition was set up by a group of academics and intellectuals, including Nobel prize-winning physician Albert Fert, who condemned it as “morally inadmissible, politically dangerous and economically absurd”.
Wauquiez said: “I don’t want the French university to close its doors to foreign students, I find that ridiculous. We got it wrong, and we must say so clearly, about a circular which has given this impression, this image to the outside world.”
Faced with mounting academic and public opposition and growing disquiet within the government, on 23 December Guéant announced that he would publish a new circular on employment of foreign students, which would “supplement” the previous one and clear up misunderstandings. In a joint statement following the meeting, the ministers said that to clear up any misunderstanding the police authorities would next week receive the complementary circular giving the directions applicable to the specific situation of highly qualified foreign graduates with at least a masters, who wished to acquire first professional experience in France.
The new circular would ask the police authorities to ensure the necessary control of professional immigration would not be to the detriment of the attractiveness of the higher education system, nor the needs of some companies for specific high-level skills.
It would spell out that deep knowledge of a foreign country or culture could constitute a sought-after skill, for example when competing in a new market, said the statement.
But in response the student association Conféderation étudiante, unions SGEN-CFDT and UNSA Education, and SOS Racisme rejected the ministers’ proposals. In a joint statement they said the ministers were continuing in their “discriminatory logic” and that the revision only clarified the existing circular. Their opposition would continue.
“Only the withdrawal, pure and simple, of the two measures penalising higher education, innovation and the French economy could satisfy us,” they said.
The order to the police authorities concerned only ‘high potential’ students, and this was unacceptable because it reinforced discrimination between students, said the unions’ statement.
Second, the amount of financial resources to which students had to prove they had access and the charges for their residence permits had been arbitrarily raised. This “endangered the international attractiveness and opening of French universities, and in the medium term the potential of innovation of our research, and therefore the growth of our economy in the sectors that badly need a qualified workforce”.
Martina Schmieder
