France’s conservative justice minister has proposed halting legal immigration for two to three years as the number of immigrants in the country hit a record high.
Gérald Darmanin has made the proposal as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign in 2027, a race in which polls favour the anti-immigration National Rally.
“Immigration would be suspended for family reunification or employment, but there would be some exceptions, for instance, for doctors, researchers and some students,” Darmanin told LCI, a news channel.
A queue outside an immigration office in Caen, northwestern France
KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
France has nearly 4.5 million legal immigrants, making up more than 8 per cent of the adult population, according to interior ministry figures released this week. The country granted legal status to 384,230 new immigrants last year. For comparison, net migration to the UK totalled 431,000 in 2024, the last year for which official figures are available.
“No politician worthy of the name has shown a lasting commitment to stemming the migratory tsunami,” Le Figaro, the conservative daily, said.
It blamed what it described as unchecked immigration for increasing support for extremist parties and distrust of politicians, and it praised Darmanin for toughening immigration policies when he served as interior minister from 2020 to 2024.
Conservatives criticised President Macron for watering down Darmanin’s immigration bill after it was passed by parliament in 2024. Darmanin has been a member of Macron’s party — now called Renaissance — since 2017.
Restrictions on family reunification, migrants’ access to benefits and the eligibility of children born in the country for French citizenship were scrapped after the president referred the bill to the Constitutional Council, a body that rules on whether new laws comply with France’s constitution.
France’s largest immigrant communities come from its former colonies in north and west Africa. Most live in big cities.
According to a recent opinion poll, nearly 80 per cent of French voters believe France should toughen its immigration policies.
Darmanin’s proposal — which is short on detail and unlikely to become law before the election — is backed by 67 per cent of French voters, according to a CSA opinion poll published on Tuesday. It was conducted for CNews, a right-wing French television news channel often compared to Fox News, the Europe 1 radio station and the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. All three are owned by Vincent Bolloré, a right-wing billionaire.
Jordan Bardella, the National Rally chairman, has said immigration is “destabilising European countries and threatening the very existence of France, with immigrant communities that want to impose their culture and their languages”.
Bardella, who will be his party’s presidential candidate unless Marine Le Pen’s disqualification over a corruption conviction is quashed by an appeals court, has pledged to clamp down on immigration and deport foreign-born criminals.
Marine Le Pen with Jordan Bardella
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Right-wing parties have often linked immigration with crime. Étienne Guyot, the prefect of the southwestern Gironde department, which includes Bordeaux, said 49 per cent of those convicted of street crimes in the city were foreigners.
Left-wing parties argue that immigrants are needed to offset France’s plunging birth rate. Traditionally one of Europe’s most fertile nations, France was dismayed by news that its deaths overtook births last year for the first time since the Second World War.
Leftists have called for undocumented migrants with jobs to be granted the right of abode in France, as they are in Spain, whose left-wing government plans to give 500,000 migrants legal status.
Darmanin ruled out such an initiative in France. However, he did leave the door open to granting legal residency to a limited number of immigrants with jobs and no criminal record, or those who would face persecution in their home countries.
After the two-to-three-year suspension of legal immigration, he said France should introduce a “quota system”, with a referendum “to ask the French people directly, how many [immigrants] you want”.
He said the system could be modelled on Canada’s annual Immigration Levels Plan, which sets how many new residents the country will admit each year in each category: economic, family reunification and refugees.
In an open letter published in Le Monde newspaper, the heads of the French magistrates’ union, the Human Rights league and several charities, including Oxfam France, said Darmanin’s immigration policies had already had “dire consequences for the lives of foreigners in France”.
They denounced any move to “legitimise increasingly repressive measures”.