Omnipresent in media and political debates, "the immigration problem" (Hmed and Laurens, 2008) has become increasingly "noisy" in France over the past two decades. The fight against irregular immigration, the discourse on asylum fraud (Akoka, 2021) and the construction of the problem of "unaccompanied minors" (Marmié, 2021; Perrot, 2019) are the main issues focusing political and media attention. Yet a counterpart to these repressive measures appears within numerous legislations. Since 2016 for example, the “talent passport”, a pluriannual permit with a number of derogations from ordinary law, is designed to facilitate the entry of "highly qualified workers, employees on assignment, researchers, company founders, holders of innovative economic projects, economic investors, legal representatives, performers and foreigners with a national or international reputation" (Ministry of Interior, 2017). The number of titles issued rose steadily - excluding the COVID period - between 2017 and 2021, from 27,544 to 41,000. How did this tool come about, and to what extent are restrictive immigration policies and rhetoric at odds with this instrument of attractiveness?
This paper proposes to look back at what we consider two pivotal periods in the development of these tools for promoting so-called skilled immigration. In doing so, the paper will pay close attention to the relationships between the actors in the bureaucratic field and economic one, along with political context. The first part covers the period 2005-2012. It will analyze the conditions under which two schemes were created and implemented: the “employee on mission card” (“carte salarié en mission"), aimed at facilitating the mobility of executives from major economic groups, and the "skills and talents card” ("carte compétences et talents"). It shows how these administrative documents are the product of the mobilization of economic actors, finding allies among the former President of Republic Nicolas Sarkozy's teams at a time when he proposed the slogan of “the selective immigration” ("l’immigration choisie"). However, the implementation of these titles was slowed down for some reasons specific to the political field in the run-up to the 2012 elections.
The second part of the paper propose to follow the trajectory of the administrative devices grouped together in 2016 within the so-called “talent passport”. It will show how start-up actors mobilized within the framework of the September 10, 2018, law to create a new rule favorable to them, echoing President Emmanuel Macron's pro-start-up rhetoric. It explore the extent to which the restrictive visa measures carried by the Ministry of the Interior since 2021- according to the diplomacy of the "robinet" (Dupont, 2022) - contradicts the territory's attractiveness policies.
This proposal project is part of a Ph.D dissertation carried out more than three years ago, for which nearly two hundred interviews were conducted, including a dozen focusing more specifically on these attractiveness measures (Foreign Affairs, Interior, Business France, Economy), and archive boxes were consulted.
