France Sets Targets for Expelling Migrants

The French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has launched his toughest and most controversial offensive yet against illegal immigration, setting local authorities individual "expulsion targets" for the coming year.

In a circular last week to France's prefects, Mr Sarkozy said he wanted at least twice as many illegal immigrants escorted to the border next year, and added that he would soon be writing personally to each official giving them a precise target figure for their area.

"The credibility of any public policy on immigration depends on effective execution of repatriation decisions," the hardline minister said in the circular, which was seen by the newspaper Le Figaro. He wants expulsion procedures improved and figures boosted even before a draconian new immigration bill becomes law, he said.

The hyperactive interior minister, France's most popular political figure by some margin, has made controlling illegal immigration one of his top priorities, closing the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais last year and ordering a police crackdown on any immigrants found near the Channel who refuse to apply for asylum in France.

He has already issued police with similar targets and incentives for tackling petty crime and delinquency, arguing that it is important for voters "to be able to see and measure the fact that this government is actually making the changes it promised to make".

But human rights groups and immigrant associations were outraged. "How can you even think it's possible to set arbitrary targets for such a complex phenomenon?" asked the C-Sur collective, which helps illegal immigrants in the Calais area. "Every case is an individual tragedy, and we're talking figures and percentages."

An estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants make it across France's frontiers every year, many headed elsewhere, notably Britain. According to the interior ministry, France expelled just 10,067 of them in 2002.

But while the monthly figure is rising steadily, hundreds of repatriations are refused every month by magistrates on technicalities. Too often, the local prefects and police chiefs who request expulsion orders from the courts make basic procedural mistakes, Mr Sarkozy believes.

The minister wants the state's senior regional representatives to set up round-the-clock "repatriation units" in each prefecture, manned by civil servants familiar with immigration law and foreigners' rights.

He also plans to send every local authority an "expulsion manual" containing case studies, model forms and standard letters, and has established a national resource and advisory centre to which hesitant officials can turn for legal and administrative help in drawing up the raft of documents necessary for repatriation.

Some officials are already expressing doubts about the effect of any attempt to impose targets. "Numbers are for show," said one, who asked not to be named. "There's no concern with quality. The result will be that police will go for the most visible immigrants, who may be illegal but who don't pose any real threat to society."

The Socialist opposition spokesman on immigration, Malek Boutih, said Mr Sarkozy's policies were "more about short-term public impact, repression and sensationalism than trying to find serious long-term solutions to a vast and very complicated global problem".