Seven decisions, one theme: immigration and borders. From the 1976 decree on family reunification to the Constitutional Council’s 2018 ruling on the “principle of fraternity,” by way of the Creil headscarf affair, Schengen, state medical aid and the EU’s so-called “return directive,” the Institut Thomas More report reads this half-century as one of progressive dispossession. This is the most sensitive installment in this series: this site’s red line applies here without exception. It criticizes public decisions and pieces of legislation; it never singles out a population, an origin or a religion as an enemy. This installment sets out what the report documents, quotes what it asserts, and marks the distance between the verifiable fact and the reading the report draws from it.
1976: family reunification, “the migratory lock opened with no way back”
The decree n°76-383 of 29 April 1976, signed by Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, granted foreign workers legally settled in France the right to bring in their spouse and minor children, subject to conditions on residence, income and housing. Two years later, the Conseil d’État (France’s top administrative court) locked this right in place legally: in its 8 December 1978 ruling (the GISTI case), it established the “right to lead a normal family life” as a general principle of law, grounded in the preamble to the 1946 Constitution. The report calls this “the founding act of the legal guardianship placed over French migration policy,” which it argues made the 1976 decision irreversible by regulatory means alone.
On the longer trajectory, the report cites INSEE, the national statistics institute: France had 3.9 million immigrants in 1975 (7.4% of the population), 7.6 million in 2024 (11.2%) - a near-doubling over fifty years. In 2024, family-related immigration in the broad sense accounted for 26.9% of first residence permits issued, the second-largest category.
1981: the amnesty for undocumented workers, “irregularity made routine”
Less than three months after François Mitterrand’s election, on 23 July 1981, the Council of Ministers agreed in principle on a large-scale regularization. The circular of 11 August 1981 (“circulaire”) set the conditions: having arrived in France before 1 January 1981 and holding stable employment. By 30 June 1983, 131,360 residence permits had been issued out of 149,226 applications - a 90% acceptance rate. The report notes that 70% of those regularized had not entered France clandestinely: they had simply overstayed a tourist visa.
The report titles its reading “irregularity made routine” and documents comparable regularizations that followed, from the 1997 “circulaire Chevènement” to the 2012 “circulaire Valls,” which it says established “a continuous flow of roughly 30,000 regularizations a year.” On the effect of these repeated operations, it cites a French government response to a written question in the National Assembly, published in the Journal officiel in 2022: “les opérations de 1981 et 1997 ont plutôt eu tendance à entretenir l’espoir d’une régularisation pour ceux qui entrent irrégulièrement sur le territoire, plutôt que de réduire le nombre d’étrangers en situation irrégulière en France” (“the 1981 and 1997 operations tended, if anything, to keep alive the hope of regularization among those entering the territory irregularly, rather than reducing the number of people in an irregular situation in France”). It is the government itself, not the report, that makes this finding.
1989: the Creil headscarf affair, “first capitulation of France to political Islam”
On 18 September 1989, the headmaster of the Gabriel-Havez lower-secondary school in Creil (Oise), Ernest Chénière, expelled three pupils who refused to remove their headscarves in class, invoking the same secularism principles he already applied to Jewish religious symbols. The affair became a national controversy within days; Lionel Jospin, then Minister of Education, chose not to rule on the matter himself and referred it to the Conseil d’État.
The opinion issued on 27 November 1989 affirmed the neutrality required of teachers, but held that this neutrality did not extend to pupils: they were entitled to express their beliefs on school premises, provided this did not interfere with teaching activities, public order or the rights of others. Wearing a headscarf, in itself, was thus neither banned nor authorized - everything depended on the pupil’s conduct and the headteacher’s own case-by-case judgment. It would take fifteen years, and the law of 15 March 2004, for a general rule to finally settle the matter, banning “the wearing of signs or attire by which pupils overtly display a religious affiliation.”
The report titles this chapter “first capitulation of France to political Islam” and concludes: “En offrant à l’islam politique une brèche juridique, la France n’a pas seulement capitulé sur le foulard : elle a renoncé à affirmer que ses valeurs et ses ‘formes de vie’ n’étaient pas négociables.” (“By handing political Islam a legal breach, France did not merely capitulate on the headscarf: it gave up asserting that its values and its ‘ways of life’ were not negotiable.”) This is the report’s own reading, presented here as such - this series does not adopt it as its own. What the chronology establishes, by contrast, is verifiable: fifteen years separate an opinion that left every case to the headteacher’s judgment from a law that set a single rule.
The report backs this reading with later data: per an Ifop survey dated 18 November 2025, cited by the report, 45% of Muslim women aged 18 to 24 now wear the veil, three times the 2003 figure (16%) - the year of the national debate over banning it in schools - and 79% of France’s Muslims describe themselves as abstaining from alcohol in 2025, against 65% in 1989. This is self-reported survey data, not a census. The report calls it « un phénomène générationnel spectaculaire » (“a spectacular generational phenomenon”).
1995: Schengen, “free movement with uncontrolled migratory effects”
Signed by five states in 1985, the convention implementing the Schengen Agreement entered into force on 26 March 1995 with Spain and Portugal joining, before being extended to the whole European Union by the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam. The report sums up its reading this way: “Destinée d’abord à favoriser la libre circulation interne, l’accord de Schengen a surtout favorisé une immigration massive en Europe.” (“Intended above all to foster internal free movement, the Schengen agreement mainly fostered mass immigration into Europe.”) It points to an asymmetry: the removal of internal border checks was immediate and binding, while the reinforcement of external borders was, from the outset, defined only as gradual and shared among states.
The report documents the 2015 migration shock: roughly 1.2 million asylum applications filed across the EU that year, against roughly 200,000 in 2010. According to the report, this shock exposed the system’s limits: overwhelmed Greek and Italian hotspots, the Dublin Regulation effectively bypassed, and Frontex - created in 2004, reinforced in 2019 - remaining a coordination body with no autonomous power to intervene.
1999: state medical aid, a scheme “with almost no equivalent in Europe”
The law of 27 July 1999, known as the “loi CMU,” simultaneously created universal health coverage (CMU) for the poorest legal residents and, for foreigners in an irregular situation, the Aide médicale de l’État (AME, state medical aid): access, subject to a three-month residency condition and an income ceiling, to 100% coverage of care with no upfront payment, in a basket of benefits close to that of ordinary social-security policyholders. The report documents continuous growth: 139,000 beneficiaries in 2001, 334,546 in 2019, 465,744 as of 30 September 2024 - a doubling in thirteen years. Cost follows the same trajectory: €831 million in 2014, €1.387 billion in 2024, a 67.6% rise.
It cites the former head of the Office français de l’immigration et de l’intégration (the immigration and integration agency), Didier Leschi, who said in 2023 that “la France, qui fait partie des mieux-disants, doit s’aligner sur ses principaux partenaires” (“France, which is among the most generous, should align itself with its main partners”). It also cites the government-commissioned Evin-Stefanini evaluation report, which it notes found that the AME card “permet l’accès à des prestations associatives du type banque alimentaire” (“gives access to charitable services such as food banks”). The report titles its chapter: “la France soigne une immigration irrégulière qu’elle ne contrôle pas” (“France provides healthcare to an irregular immigration it does not control”) - a value judgment presented as such, to be kept distinct from the figures preceding it.
2008: the “return directive,” “when Europe guarantees irregular migrants the right to stay”
Adopted on 16 December 2008, Directive 2008/115/EC set common standards for removing foreigners in an irregular situation across the EU: a voluntary-departure period of 7 to 30 days before any coercive measure, and administrative detention capped at six months, extendable by twelve in limited cases. Transposed into French law by the “loi Besson” of 16 June 2011, it created the obligation de quitter le territoire français (OQTF, obligation to leave French territory) with a 30-day departure window. Between 2010 and 2023, the number of OQTFs issued rose 3.5-fold, from 39,083 to 137,730, while the enforcement rate kept falling.
The report draws on the Cour des comptes (national audit office), which found in January 2024 that “seules 12 % des OQTF sont exécutées” (“only 12% of OQTFs are enforced”), and on the National Assembly’s law committee, which put the 2024 enforcement rate at 11.5% - against a European average of 30%. The Cour des comptes itself calls “fantasmatique” (“fantastical”) the presidential goal of enforcing 100% of OQTFs, and points to three obstacles: a shortage of detention-center places, the impossibility of identifying 20 to 30% of the people targeted, and the refusal of certain countries of origin to cooperate. The European Commission itself acknowledged, as early as 2017, that “l’application incohérente [de la directive] par les États membres nuit à l’efficacité de la politique de l’Union en matière de retour” (“the inconsistent application [of the directive] by member states undermines the effectiveness of the Union’s return policy”).
2018: the “principle of fraternity,” when the Constitutional Council legislates
On 6 July 2018, ruling on a priority constitutional question brought by Cédric Herrou, a farmer in the Alpes-Maritimes convicted for having brought more than a hundred and fifty foreigners into France unlawfully, the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) established a new principle of constitutional value: fraternity, drawn from the Republic’s motto rather than from any pre-existing constitutional text. The direct consequence: Parliament had to amend the code governing foreigners’ entry and residence (Ceseda) to exempt from criminal sanction any assistance to irregular residence provided for “humanitarian reasons” - only assistance to irregular entry remained punishable.
The report classifies this decision among institutional matters rather than immigration proper. One clarification is needed here: it is in connection with the “return” directive, not with this decision, that the report lists the 1978 GISTI ruling among the cornerstones of a system that obstructs removal. Drawing the line between those two successive judicial expansions of protection for irregular residence is this series’ doing, not the report’s. The report’s own phrasing is blunt: “Ce jour-là, le Conseil constitutionnel ne s’est pas borné à interpréter la loi : il l’a faite. Sans mandat électoral. Sans débat parlementaire. Sans compte à rendre aux électeurs.” (“That day, the Constitutional Council did not merely interpret the law: it made it. With no electoral mandate. With no parliamentary debate. Answerable to no voters.”) This is a judgment on the constitutional judge’s role, not a neutral finding - presented here as such.
What this installment finds
The same mechanism recurs across these seven decisions: a text presented, at the time of its adoption, as technical or strictly humanitarian, whose cumulative effects the report reads, decades later, as the progressive loss of the state’s grip on its own migration policy. The figures cited - from INSEE, the Cour des comptes, the European Commission, the National Assembly - come mostly from public or parliamentary bodies and can be checked independently of the labels the report gives them: “the migratory lock opened with no way back,” “first capitulation of France to political Islam,” “France provides healthcare to an irregular immigration it does not control.” These are the words of an avowedly partisan think tank, not this series’ own; the overall assessment waits for the final installment.
This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report - it is not a publication of the Institut Thomas More. Read the full report (PDF, 112 pages, in French) - 1975-2025 : les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, Institut Thomas More, June 2026.
