The French government has made a u-turn on its post-study visa rules for overseas students following an outcry from the country’s leading higher education institutions. In changes described by Pierre Tapie, president of ESSEC Business School, as “a radical shift from the government’s initial position (that) answers 90 percent of our concerns”, in mid-January the French ministry of the interior issued a new diktat on student immigration, easing post-study visa rules for foreign graduates.
As Times Higher Education reported last November, the work-visa applications of hundreds of top overseas graduates who had found work in France were rejected or delayed last year after the interior ministry issued stricter immigration rules to local authorities in May.
But a memo sent in mid-January calls on local officials to award foreign graduates who have completed a Masters degree in France, the right to work. Caroline Fourest, a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris, says the move acknowledges that the work-visa clampdown was a mistake: “The government went too far in its repressive and defensive policies, and this time realised it had gone too far, so it is a victory for us,” says Fourest.
Currently there are hundreds of overseas graduates struggling to obtain work visas, according to the 31 May Group of students set up to protest against the rules. Many students and academics say they will continue their protest against the government. Dr. Tapie, who leads the Conference of the Grandes Ecoles, a group of elite French universities, says academic lobbying had been crucial in securing the policy change. “Our action was part-public, part-intense personal negotiation with government officials. We lobbied hard and brought individual cases to the attention of the highest levels of the administration,” he says.
In France, as in the UK, the concern was partly about rising hostility to French institutions abroad, with the message appearing to be that international students were no longer welcome on French soil. “That’s why the protest has such resonance,” says Yves Lecointe, president of the University of Nantes. “Everywhere university presidents were dealing with one, two, sometimes 10 or 20 cases of graduates struggling with their visa applications.”
The campaign was joined by some of France’s best-known scholars, including Nobel laureate Albert Fert, who said the regulations had already started to damage postdoctoral research in the country. “Postdoc students in their prime are a real driving force in research labs,” he says. “Today, many postdoc candidates are worried, and some have already seen their visa applications rejected.”
The result, he says is that France risks “sending its best brains abroad and will not see anybody coming here and compensating for this loss”.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)