French press review 23 October 2013

Facts contradict some prejudices on immigration. The government is compared to a late-night bar. And bosses may be let off more social security contributions.

Catholic La Croix uses the pretext of the Leonarda affair to look at the realities behind the troubled question of immigration in France. Some of the findings are surprising.

France welcomes, if that's the correct word, an average of 100,000 migrants every year, far fewer than the 400,000 who enter the United Kingdom every 12 months or the 220,000 each for Italy, Spain and Germany. And 40 per cent of the French entries are the spouses or children of French citizens.

Women now represent nearly 50 per cent of new arrivals - they were just 16 per cent in 1974 - and are frequently accompanied by children. Those youngsters are immediately entitled to the same level of state protection as the children of French nationals.

In 1982 most immigrants were from Spain, Portugal or Algeria; now they come from Algeria, Morocco and China.

Which puts the problems of the highly visible Roma population in perspective. 

There are only 17,000 of them in total. But they tend to be very poor when they arrive and don't have the support networks available to north African and Chinese arrivals. They thus represent an immediate pressure on social resources, as well as facing a high risk of being forced into begging or petty crime.

Left-leaning Libération also devotes its front page to the immigration debate, suggesting that the conservative party, the UMP, is becoming increasingly alligned with the far-right Front National. Libération accuses UMP leader, Jean-François Copé, of calling into question certain key republican values. Copé wants to make it more difficult for foreigners to obtain French nationality, notably by abolishing the law which grants citizenship to any child born on French soil.

Le Figaro celebrates the decision by the French ecology movement to call on secondary school students to continue their protests calling for a return to France of Leonarda Dibrani, recently taken off a school bus and set back to Kosovo with her family.

This, says the right-wing paper, is a further sign of disunity in high places, a shameful spectacle as government members call for protests against, well, the government. Le Figaro says France is currently being run on the same lines as a late-night free bar: Lots of noise, nonsense and the vague threat of violence. And it's all the fault of President François Hollande, a man incapable of keeping his troops in line.

Business paper Les Echos looks at government plans to encourage French businesses by reducing the various social charges paid by employers. Changes will be considered next spring with a view to applying them in the course of 2015.

The same paper worryingly reports that 35,000 tax payers left France in the course of 2011, compared to 21,000 in the previous 12 months. The vast majority of these "fiscal refugees" are highly qualified young people.