France has “600,000 to 700,000” undocumented migrants, according to Gérald Darmanin

France has “600,000 to 700,000” people in an irregular situation on its territory, said Sunday to the Parisian
Gérald Darmanin, congratulating himself on having “much less illegal immigrants than most of the major European countries, starting with Great Britain”.

In the absence of data in France on undocumented migrants, the number of beneficiaries of State Medical Aid (AME), a healthcare access system intended for people in an irregular situation, is traditionally used as a statistic to measure their presence in the territory. Thus, in November 2017, the Minister of the Interior at the time, Gérard Collomb, estimated “around 300,000” the number of undocumented migrants in France, which then had 311,310 AME beneficiaries.

Darmanin’s satisfaction on the evictions

The budget documents of the finance bill for 2022 mention “382,899 beneficiaries” as of December 31, 2020. But, according to a study by the Institute for Research and Documentation in Health Economics (Irdes) and the University of Bordeaux, unveiled in November 2019, only one in two irregular migrants eligible for State Medical Aid benefited from it.

Professor Jérôme Wittwer, co-author of the report, estimated at the time with AFP that the number of AME beneficiaries could therefore be doubled to approach the actual total number of irregular migrants in France, or around 765,000 at the end of 2020.

Gérald Darmanin was also pleased that France receives “15,000 asylum requests less than Germany” and “expels three times more people in an irregular situation than the English, twice as many as the Italians and 50% of more than the Spaniards ”.