“For the left, which wants to win back the working cles, nothing is worse than embarred silence on this subject”

IThere was a time, long ago, when employers and the right in power openly admitted their “need” for immigrant workers. Or Francis Bouygueswhich employed 80% of foreigners on its sites, boasted publicly (in 1969) “their fundamental quality for [lui] employer, and any [sa] sympathy : (…) They come to us to work”. Where the collieries of the North and of Lorraine, as told The world, sent a recruiting sergeant to southern Morocco to hire 80,000 minors (between 1960 and 1980). Before the National embly in 1963, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou was clear: “Immigration is a means of creating a certain relaxation on the labor market and of resisting social pressure. »

But since, in the 1980s, immigration became a recurring subject of political one-upmanship, French employers have been careful to keep a low profile: immigrants have never stopped performing the tasks “which the French do not want”. pas”, but those who use them, sometimes illegally, do not shout it from the rooftops.

With the crisis due to Covid-19, and its foreign caregivers, doctors and delivery people on the “front line” and applauded, the labor shortage that ensued in restaurants, hospitals and on construction sites has slightly disturbed this silence: bakers and restaurateurs have publicized their battle to regularize their indispensable Africans, illustrating the dependence on immigration, regular or not, of whole sections of the French economy.

However, as soon as the government announced a bill including the regularization of foreigners working in sectors “in tension”the curtain has fallen. “We will know how to use them”admitted the boss of Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, while claiming that “it is not up to the bosses to decide on migration policy”. Such hypocrisy hides the divisions of employers: between sectors such as construction or catering, where the contribution of immigrants is vital, and the others; between large companies, which ume the liberal discourse and the appeal to foreign employees, and SMEs, more sensitive to the political climate on immigration.

The trap set by the far right

The left, the other potential ally of the government’s liberal ambitions in terms of regularizing undocumented migrants, is, curiously, no more mobilized to push for provisions which nevertheless go in the direction of its fights. Apart from the Pavlovian refusal to “give Macron a present”, apart from the understandable criticism of the other repressive aspects of the governmental project, the progressives find themselves paralyzed by an old and unresolved divide, between the culture of internationalist emancipation which supports the ideal of a world without borders and therefore human migrations, and another idea, also Marxist, which makes foreign workers the“reserve army” capital and refuses, with Jean Jaurès “ that international capitalism seek its labor in the markets where it is most degraded (…)to throw it away (…) on the French market and to bring wages all over the world to the level of the countries where they are lowest”.

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