France’s Parliament has approved an immigration overhaul, which was made tougher under right-wing pressure. This win secures a legislative win for President Emmanuel Macron, but also risks a political crisis for a leader elected twice on centrist vows to keep far-right populism at bay.
The bill, which received 349 votes in favor and 186 against during a raucous late-night session in the National Assembly, the lower house, will make skilled workers in fields experiencing labor shortages eligible for one-year, temporary residency permits under some conditions. It also streamlines the asylum process, but it also tightens rules allowing foreigners to work, live or study in France.
The bill also makes foreigners eligible for state subsidies like housing aid or family allowances only after they have lived in France for several months or even years. It makes it harder for immigrants to legally bring over family members and forces foreign students to pay new visa fees.
In a rare sign of dissent, 37 of Mr. Macron’s own party members voted against the bill or abstained, as did 22 lawmakers from other parties in his alliance. The far right, in an equally rare move, trumpeted its support for the government’s proposals, with all 88 of its lawmakers voting in favor.
To break the deadlock, Mr. Macron’s government coaxed conservative lawmakers with tougher measures that infuriated the left, angered some of Mr. Macron’s allies and prompted the National Rally, France’s most prominent far-right party, to gleefully proclaim it had won the battle of ideas.
In an apparent attempt to resolve that tension, Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, announced before the result that “there will be no bill if there is no majority without the National Rally.” The vote occurred a week after the lower house shocked the government by unexpectedly rejecting a previous version of the bill, which the left deemed too harsh and the right and far right declared too lenient.
The move was interpreted as meaning that Mr. Macron would enact the new law only if it could have passed even without the far right’s support, as was the case on Tuesday.
The National Rally party has long argued that French citizens should have preferential or even exclusive access to government subsidies and aid, and that foreigners should have restricted or no access to such benefits.
While Mr. Macron has pitched himself as a centrist defender of liberal democracy, critics say that his decision to support a bill that reflects many right-wing, anti-immigration beliefs has shattered that image.
Lawmakers for an alliance of leftist Socialist and Green parties in the lower house harangued the government ahead of the vote. One of the lawmakers, André Chassaigne, said that Mr. Macron had been elected on the promise to “protect us from the worst” of the far right.
The government said tougher immigration rules were necessary to keep the French safe, for instance by making it easier to deport foreigners who are convicted of crimes, and pointed to measures in the bill that the far right rejects, like a ban on putting minors in detention centers for illegal immigrants.
The country’s defender of rights, an independent ombudsman that monitors civil and human rights, alerted Parliament that the bill “seriously undermines the principle of equality and nondiscrimination, the bedrock of our Republic.”