For millions of French people, the front-page headline in yesterday's Figaro was a nightmare made inevitable by the left's parliamentary election victory. The prefectures overwhelmed by sans-papier, France's right-wing newspaper announced.
The sans-papiers - literally "without papers" - have become one of France's most vocal protest groups since they occupied the Saint Ambroise Church in Paris in March 1996. For the following 15 months they were chased from one place to another, until they were expelled by axe-carrying riot police from the Saint
Bernard Church in August 1997. The left raised huge hopes in its May election campaign by promising clemency for them.
In the month since the Interior Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement, issued new guidelines on legal residence, more than 20,000 immigrants have applied to the central Paris prefecture alone. The vast majority of applicants are African or north African Arabs - the people who Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen's racist National
Front wants to expel. The demand is so great that officials have run out of application forms several times. They give only one document to each person, and a black market in forms has sprung up.
Prefectures throughout France have had to take on extra personnel to cope with the paperwork, and some predict it will take a year and a half to process all the applications received before the November 1st deadline. A last-minute rush is expected, since many illegal aliens are waiting to see how their colleagues fare before filing their own applications.
The stakes in France's immigration lottery are high: any foreigner who fails to meet the criteria, Mr Chevenement's guidelines say, will be "invited" to leave French territory. The minister has ordered civil servants to be as flexible as possible in judging applications. In some cases, four civil servants are required to sign rejections.
The guidelines seek to grant legal residence to foreigners who have established a family in France or worked here for many years without obtaining the precious "papers". Eleven categories are now regularisables, including the spouses of French people or foreigners who are here legally, the parents of children born in France, foreigners who are "well integrated into French life", and those who have been denied political asylum but "whose return to their country would expose them to serious risks".
The new regulations do away with the limbo created by the 1993 Pasqua Law, under which many immigrants could neither be legally expelled nor given residence papers. Immigration remains one of the most volatile political issues in France. No matter how many aliens are legalised under the left's policy, the right will be indignant, while some on the left continue to campaign for completely open borders.
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has commissioned a special report on immigration to be handed to him on July 31st. It will serve as the basis for draft legislation on residence and nationality, to replace the Pasqua and Debre laws established by the right when it was in power. More than 100,000 French people demonstrated against the Debre law last winter. This autumn's parliamentary debates are likely to be equally impassioned.
