Friday, June 01, 2007

France to Pay Immigrants to Return Home

- France's new Immigration, Integration and National Identity Minister, Brice Hortefeux toured Charles de Gaulle airport on his first day on the job. He has said he intends to pay more immigrants to return home. -

New conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy made immigration a central issue of his campaign. Now, his new minister for immigration and national identity, Brice Hortefeux, says its time to start paying immigrants to leave the country.
The government is planning to offer incentives to more immigrants to return home voluntarily. "We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that," Hortefeux said in an interview with RFI radio.

Under the scheme, Paris will provide each family with a nest egg of €6,000 ($8,000) for when they go back to their country of origin. A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families.

Hortefeux, who heads up the new "super-ministery" of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development, said he wants to pursue a "firm but humane" immigration policy.
The new ministry was a central pledge in Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign, who had warned that France was exasperated by "uncontrolled immigration."

Since he was appointed by the new president last Friday, Hortefeux has insisted that "co-development" will be an important plank of French immigration policy. He argued that the system of voluntary return can be seen as a means for investment in developing countries. He said that the method of transferring funds via returning immigrants to their country of origin was a better policy than providing aid for development.

"To be integrated, you need language skills and a professional activity," he told RFI, and said he is considering introducing a language test to prospective immigrants.

France is home to an estimated 1.5 million immigrants from mostly Muslim North Africa and 500,000 from sub-Saharan Africa, according to the 2004 census.

Asked on RFI about how the notion "national identity," fits into the new ministry -- the term has been fiercely criticized by the French left -- Hortefeux said: "This should not be understood as something menacing, but on the contrary, it is initiative with the aim of bringing coherence."

4 comments:

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video surveillance said...

$8000 seems a lot of money to leave France, but people by returning to their original countries will need to jobs and support themselves and families!!

That kind of money sounds great at the beginning but after those people leave France will need more!!

metro ethernet said...

I would like to know what garanteed for them to have this money and what happend before they send them back to their countrys isint true that they have to wait in a detention center meanwhile they know they are granted with they money and being mixed with criminals and still you wouldnt know if you are getting the money this guy on the picture might be the only lucky dude to go with it they had to make it seem nice for the picture but for the others, i think this is just a lie and they just want to trick them to leave the country and once you accept to go that is it no money for you so dont beleive this because i cant tell you for a fact that its a big fat lie.

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