With swagger and passion, and often a rolled cigarette between his fingers, Etienne Guerraud talked for hours about his business, the "last great independent brasserie in Paris." To keep Le Café du Commerce (in Paris's 15th arrondissement) running, he has been using foreign labor for years. "Without them, I close down," he said. Foreigners make up 40% of his 50-odd employees. Among them are Mauritanians Idriss (the pastry chef) and Hamadi (the kitchen hand). There's also Dieuvenor, a Haitian dishwasher, and Mamadou, a Malian cook... "I wouldn't trade them for a Frenchman. They're great guys."
Mr. Guerraud, too, is familiar with regularization procedures. How many times has an employee come to him, after several months of being on contract, to admit that they had presented someone else's residence permit to him at the time of hiring and that in reality, they were an illegal immigrant? It is called working under an alias. On each occasion, Mr. Guerraud guided his employees through the tedious and uncertain procedure of regularization through work.
In 2012, the instructions set out by Interior Minister Manuel Valls defined the exceptional circumstances under which a prefect may grant a residence permit to a worker (the so-called Valls criteria): They must present 24 payslips, have been in France for at least three years and provide a guarantee of employment. Just over 8,000 people benefited from this in 2021.
'We're at the end of our rope'
Not so easy. Dieuvenor, the 30-year-old Haitian dishwasher has met all the requirements for regularization since June 2021. But he has to wait for an appointment at the Yvelines prefecture in December 2022 to file his application for a residence permit. It will no doubt be more than a year before he receives a response. Until then, he is "afraid." "We're at the end of our rope," said Mr. Guerraud. "We need to simplify things."
To denounce the ineptitude of prefectures and their inaccessibility to foreign workers, the Conféderation générale du travail (CGT the French national trade union center) organized a rally on Wednesday, June 29, in front of the direction générale des etrangers en France (DGEF, the General Directorate for Foreigners in France) in Paris. The union wants "an end to the 'discretion' of prefectures" and for regularization procedures to be initiated simply upon presentation of proof of work. "Entire sectors of the economy would not function without their labor force," said the CGT.
More and more employers are endorsing this position. Jean Ganizate, the co-founder of the Melt restaurant group, said, "The reality is that every restaurant owner in Paris has someone working under an alias. The French don't want to do the difficult jobs anymore." Mr. Ganizate is familiar with the CGT, which has supported him with several cases of regularization for Senegalese, Papuan and Bangladeshi cooks. Today, he is again asking the union to help him. One of his sous-chefs, a Sri Lankan who has been in France for more than 10 years, is afraid of becoming an illegal worker as he has yet to receive news of his application for renewing his residence permit.
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