A top member of the French deep state is facing calls to resign after admitting he delayed a report on migration failures until after a critical vote in the National Assembly on reforms to the fledgling system.
A report last week from the Court of Auditors, an independent government body responsible for tracking the use of public money, found that combatting illegal migration costs the French taxpayer a staggering 1.8 billion euros per year, representing ten per cent of total police expenses. The revelation fundamentally undermines the premise pushed by the left and globalist forces that mass migration is a net benefit to society.
Meanwhile, the government’s performance was also criticised by the auditor’s report, which found that border controls are “very limited” and that the border police only recorded the identity of migrants who were actually arrested. Even then, border officials regularly refused to enter their identities into a national information system, which the report noted would have assisted the government in being able to deport them later.
In addition, border officials often fail to perform basic police background checks on illegal migrants entering the country, the report found, potentially endangering the country to further violence and terror attacks.
The daming review of the government’s performance and the cost to the public was due to be released to the public on December 13th, however, its publication was withheld until last week by the president of the Court of Auditors Pierre Moscovici, a former member of the Communist Revolutionary League, who later served as Eurocrat and a finance minister for the socialist government of former French President François Hollande.
The leftist deep state bureaucrat argued that he was justified in withholding the release of the report given that it was initially due to be published during a debate in the National Assembly about immigration reform. Moscovici claimed that allowing the public to become aware of the government’s failures on migration could have “interfered” with the vote on the immigration bill.
Moscovici went on to claim that he “did not want this report to be distorted” by the political debate happening in the country, saying that “we were in a political crisis, at a time when rational arguments were barely heard.”
His decision to delay the publication of the report came as the far-left and right-wing populists of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) banded together to block the initial draft of President Emmanuel Macron’s immigration bill in the National Assembly. Although the bill was later amended and pushed forward following concessions to Le Pen, legislators were not given the opportunity to consider all of the recommendations laid out in the report from the Court of Auditors.
There are growing calls for Moscovici to be removed from his powerful deep-state position over his move to keep information from the public. The centrist head of the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Laurent Wauquiez said on Sunday that the Moscovici “must resign”.
“Pierre Moscovici claims to have deliberately delayed the publication of a report from the Court of Auditors so that its conclusions could not be known during the parliamentary debate on the immigration law,” the Les Republicains politician proclaimed. “This is a serious breach of our democracy and of the most basic constitutional obligations imposed on the Court of Auditors.”