What Behind the Visa Crisis Resolution Between France and the Arab Maghreb Countries?

Since French President Emmanuel Macron held power in May 2017, he has started to implement policies hostile to immigrants, especially from the Maghreb countries.

France decided to expel a number of its immigrants, but their countries refused to accept them, which created a political crisis—the most prominent was the visa issue.

The crisis has apparently ended after the two parties’ statements. On December 30, 2022, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced that his country welcomed the increase in the number of deportees from France, and before that, Tunisia took a similar step.

While Morocco did not declare an explicit position, its acceptance on January 13, 2023, to receive Moroccan imam Hassan Iquioussen, deported from France, indicates that the kingdom also obeyed French directives.

Has France really won the visa battle with the countries of the Maghreb, which has exploded since September 2021?

 

Morocco and ‘Extortion’

Unlike Tunisia and Algeria, France did not obtain a clear declaration that its conditions are accepted in Morocco. However, the incident of imam Hassan Iquioussen reflects the fact that Paris defeated the three Maghreb countries in the visa file, according to observers.

On December 16, 2022, the French Foreign Minister announced in a joint conference with Moroccan Nasser Bourita from Rabat, saying: “We have taken measures, with our Moroccan partners, to return to full cooperation in the field of migration, and this decision has entered into force.”

However, Bourita commented: “Morocco refrained from commenting officially on those measures (reducing the number of visas) that were taken by the French authorities unilaterally out of respect for its sovereignty, and of course there were popular reactions on the part of the people concerned.”

He added: “Today, too, the unilateral decision to return to normalcy is respected by Morocco, and we will not comment on this officially…but things are moving in the right direction.”

The Moroccan minister was not satisfied with this answer, he went to the second chamber of Parliament to announce after 5 days Morocco’s official position on how France would end the visa crisis between the two sides.

Bourita said in the House of Councilors, December 20, 2022: “If granting a visa is a sovereign right, then it is not a grant or charity that is used as a tool of blackmail or humiliation.

“During the other months, there were some cases in which the visa was used, for purposes unrelated to consular cooperation.”

He continued: “If granting a visa is a sovereign right, then accepting its request and dealing with its applicant must be based on respect for the country to which the citizen belongs.”

Despite this official Moroccan rhetoric, Rabat’s reception of imam Hassan Iquioussen, who was expelled by France, calls for a reconsideration of these statements.

January 13, 2023 was a remarkable day, as it witnessed a new stage in the battle of Rabat and Paris over the deportation of Moroccan imam Hassan Iquioussen, coming from France to Belgium and then Morocco, after his arrest on September 30, 2022.

According to what his lawyer, Lucy Simon, told the press, the Moroccan imam was deported on a plane from Brussels to Casablanca after the Moroccan authorities issued his entry permit.

The Belgian Minister of State for Asylum and Migration, Nicole de Moor, thanked France for its cooperation in returning the imam to Morocco, his country of origin.

According to his French lawyer, Lucy Simon, she is awaiting a ruling on the validity of the French deportation order and believes that the possible cancellation will oblige France to guarantee his entry into French territory.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin had issued an order to deport him at the end of July 2022, despite a court ruling unacceptance.

This prompted imam Hassan Iquioussen to flee to Belgium, and he remained there until January 2023, when Rabat and Brussels agreed to deport him.

On the relationship of Iquioussen’s deportation to the Moroccan–French visa crisis, Khalid Mouna, a researcher in immigration affairs and a professor of sociology at the Moulay Ismail College of Arts and Human Sciences in Meknes, said: “It is a scapegoat for French racist policies.”

Khalid Mouna continued, in a statement to Al-Estiklal, that what the French government did against the French-born citizen, Hassan Iquioussen, is a crime against the legal rule “the right to land,” which guarantees the right of any person born on any land to carry its nationality.

Imam Hassan Iquioussen (51 years old) lived in northern France, and although he was born, raised, and spent his entire life in France, he does not hold French citizenship; he was deported because of his “Islamic activity.”

However, his five children and fifteen grandchildren are French. Khalid Mouna continued: “What should be noted is that the case of Hassan Iquioussen is included in the agreement to return undesirable persons between Morocco and a number of countries in the world, and therefore it is far from settling the issue of visas.”

 

Algerian–Tunisian Approval

In addition to Morocco, at exactly the end of 2022, the crisis finally came to an end, and the statements of officials in Algeria and Tunisia revealed France’s success in achieving its demands.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced, in a televised interview with France 2, on October 27, 2022, that “the visa policy has succeeded” because it helped his country return 3,000 people to their countries within two years.

He added: “We will intensify the expulsions to reach 100% of all illegal persons and those who disturb public order.”

He continued, according to the report published by the American Alhurra website on October 28 of the same year: “We discussed in an effective way with these countries, and we told them that if you do not take back the people who were asked to leave French soil, we will restrict the granting of visas.”

Macron stressed that “the crisis that Paris’s relations with Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria went through, regarding the issue of visas, is due to their lack of cooperation on the issue of deporting their nationals.”

On December 30, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced, in his interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, the end of the visa crisis and Algeria’s acceptance of “increasing the number of deportees.”

President Tebboune said during an interview that “this is a return to the situation under the Evian Conventions and the 1968 Agreement on the Movement of Persons. In general, the number of deportees has been raised.”

Before Algiers, Paris and Tunis announced in early September 2022 that the issuance of French visas to Tunisians would return to its normal level, with immediate effect.

This came in a joint statement issued in the wake of a phone call between French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin and his Tunisian counterpart, Tawfik Charafeddine.

The French Ministry of the Interior stated that Tunisia was the first among the three countries to remove the requirement to conduct health checks to enter its territory.

It stressed that Tunisia has made great progress in cooperation with Paris to combat illegal immigration.

France said that after a series of government meetings with its Maghreb counterparts, it decided to tighten the issuance of visas so that the Maghreb countries would be subject to the conditions of Paris.

On September 28, 2021, the French government announced tightening the conditions for granting entry visas to citizens of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia due to the refusal of these countries to issue consular permits to take back their citizens who are living illegally in France.

This came in statements made by the French government spokesman, Gabriel Attal, to Europe 1 radio and published by the AFP on September 28, 2021.

France reduced the number of visas for citizens of Morocco and Algeria by half and the number of visas for Tunisian citizens by a third.

The French official added: “It is a radical and unprecedented decision, but it was necessary because these countries do not accept the return of nationals, we do not want them, and we cannot keep them in France.”

 

Maghrebi Anger

For its part, the BBC published, on September 29, 2021, quoting French media, that during the first six months of the same year, only 22 Algerians were expelled from French territory, despite the rejection of 7,731 visa applications.

80 Moroccans were expelled, and 3,301 visa applications were rejected. As for Tunisia, 131 of its citizens were expelled after the refusal of 3424 visa applications.

The Maghreb responses were not long in coming, as Tunisian President Kais Saied called Macron and expressed his “regret” at Paris’ announcement to reduce the number of visas granted to Tunisians, according to the Tunisian presidency.

On October 2, 2021, The Euronews published, quoting a statement by the Tunisian presidency, Said’s expression “of his regret at the decision to reduce the number of visas granted to Tunisians wishing to go to France.”

The French president responded by stating that this procedure could be reviewed.

Saied believed that “the issue of irregular migration can only be addressed on the basis of a new vision,” stressing that “the search for a solution to this phenomenon will take place after the formation of the new Tunisian government.”

Algeria summoned the French ambassador on September 29, 2021, according to what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced in a statement in which it considered that “this decision came without prior consultation with the Algerian side.”

The Algerian Foreign Ministry’s statement included that the ambassador, Francois Gouyette, “has been informed of an official protest from the government against the backdrop of a unilateral decision by Paris that affects the quality and smoothness of the movement of Algerian nationals towards France.”

Morocco, in turn, did not remain idly by. According to the Maghreb Arabe Presse (MAP), “Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita affirmed, on September 28, 2021, that France’s decision to tighten visa conditions for Moroccan citizens is unjustified and does not reflect the reality of consular cooperation in the field of combating illegal immigration.”

Bourita continued: “We have taken note of this decision, and we considered it unjustified for a number of reasons, the first of which is that Morocco has always dealt with the issue of immigration with a logic of responsibility and the necessary balance between facilitating the movement of people (students, businessmen, and others) and between combating clandestine immigration and dealing strictly with people in detention.”

At a time when the French authorities are confirming the end of the visa crisis with the three Maghreb countries, researcher Khalid Mouna said that it is hasty to promote this statement as a fact for the simple reason that France today is governed by right-wing policies hostile to citizens of North African origin.

In a statement to Al-Estiklal, Khalid Mouna presented two things to explain the visa crisis. The first is that the decision came to appease the extreme right, and the second is that the decision transgresses international law, represented in punishing countries (that take such a measure).

He explained that “the visa crisis cannot be said that it ended once the French government declared that.”

The researcher divided “the repercussions into three levels. The first is related to the political aspect. The issue of visas was dealt with by Morocco, for example, as if it were a French private affair. It did not interfere in it or interact with it. It left France as if it were in a match without an opponent.”

The second level, according to Khalid, “is the economic aspect. France, with its behavior, has greatly affected the interests of French small and medium enterprises and companies, which found themselves victims of the French decision that restricted them.”

He added: “Perhaps France’s decision to appoint a new ambassador to Morocco, for example, with economic background, is evidence of its attempt to compensate for its economic losses from the visa decision.”

Khalid said: “As for the third level, it is the cultural aspect, as the French visa decision directed the middle class and the elites in the Maghreb region. We used to hear that doctors, engineers, politicians, artists, and others were banned.”

This means that France has lost a strong ally within Moroccan societies, and it is impossible for it to replace that in the future, according to him.