Chronicle Decided in the name of the market, of global work, and of labor mobility, the new French law on “immigration in shortage occupations” will further accelerate the brain drain from the Maghreb.
n France, institutionalized assistantship is the main obstacle to employment. However, instead of taking the unpopular but necessary substantive measures that would put the French back to work, for fear of the unions, the government has chosen to encourage the North African elites to leave a continent where they are nevertheless essential, in order to come work in France.
“We want to simplify access to the territory for specific skills, which the economy needs”, announced Olivier Dussopt, French Minister of Labor, on Wednesday, November 2, 2022, in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde.
However, decided in the name of the market, global work, and labor mobility, this law will further accelerate the brain drain from the Maghreb. It is enough to read Global Talent Comptitiveness.net to understand that the Maghreb will automatically suffer a hemorrhage of its talents. In the ranking of countries that manage to keep their executives, Algeria indeed occupies the 105th place out of 125 countries, Morocco the 100th, and Tunisia the 84th. The “immigration shortage occupations” law will therefore serve as an outlet for skills from these three countries to France, while tens of thousands of executives have already been lost by them, i.e., according to studies, at least 30% of their total “grey matter”.
In 2022, 60,000 North African senior executives were thus employed elsewhere than in their respective countries, including 6,000 Tunisians (2,300 engineers, 1,000 doctors, 2,300 teacher-researchers, and 450 computer scientists). Morocco, which loses dozens of doctors every year, is experiencing an overall deficit of several tens of thousands of medical executives who have left to practice abroad (Moroccan Union of Doctors, April 2022).
In 2021, doctors practicing in France and holding foreign diplomas outside the European Union were 31.5% from North Africa, including 22.2% from Algeria, 5.8% from Morocco, 2.5% from Tunisia, and 1% from Egypt. These figures do not take into account North African doctors who have obtained French diplomas.
With the greatest cynicism, the countries of the North therefore “import” medical personnel from a continent which, on the global average, has less than 15 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, to install them in countries which, like France, number 380 per 100,000 inhabitants… ( Center for Global Development CGD).
In 2020-2021, France welcomed 91,064 students from the Maghreb, including 46,371 Moroccans, 31,032 Algerians, and 13,661 Tunisians. It is naturally quite essential and even highly mutually enriching that North African students can come and train in France. However, the obligation to return at the end of their studies should be the law. In the event of non-return, it is indeed the gray matter of their respective countries which is in a way lost because the men and women necessary for their countries are offered to the market and who will be employed elsewhere than at home.
The phenomenon does not only affect the medical community. Many pharmacies or intermediaries indeed live from the purchase of sportsmen. Practice is known and observable by all, particularly in the field of football as shown by Maryse Ewanjé-Epée, in her book Les Négriers du foot (Editions du Rocher, 2010), or even in that of athletics.
