The French Ministry of the Interior has released its latest report on key immigration figures for 2020. These indicators presented are annual and go up to 2020, the most recent year for which results are available.
They are organized around the main themes of the foreign population in France and in other countries, residence permits and documents, visas, asylum, integration, the fight against irregular immigration and immigration. in the overseas departments.
In terms of visas and residence permits, the ministry notes that the year 2020 is marked by the start of the Covid 19 pandemic and the first periods of confinement.
The restrictions on the movement of people, international in particular, and the closure or slowdown in the activity of certain administrations make this an unprecedented period. Its results in terms of immigration cannot be compared to those of previous years without having these specificities in mind.
It appears that the visa activity collapsed from the first period of confinement. French embassies and consulates abroad processed 870,798 visa applications in 2020 against 4,290,482 in 2019. The number of issues logically followed the same trend (- 79.8%), with 71,317 visas issued in 2020.
The first four countries (Morocco, Russia, Algeria and China) provide approximately 43% of the visa issuance activity of our network.
Morocco thus becomes the first country of delivery despite a pronounced drop (- 71.5%). China is the country where the impact of the pandemic Covid-19 crisis is the most marked with a decline in the issuance of French visas of 91.5%: it goes from first to fourth place.
Like the other Maghreb countries, the impact of the health crisis on the issuance of visas in 2020 is a little less marked for Algeria than for all the countries as a whole (- 73.5% against – 79, 8% for all countries), further notes the ministry.
Statistics also show that three out of ten first titles are issued to nationals of Maghreb countries.
The main nationalities are not all affected to the same extent by the general decline in migration in the context of covid. Moroccan and Algerian nationals remain the most numerous among the beneficiaries of the first residence permits in France, with a much lower decline than the overall one (respectively -14.1% and -12.9%). Tunisians keep third place but experience a drop closer to the average (- 21.6%). Chinese (- 44.6%) and US (- 40.7%) nationals are showing the strongest decreases, in student titles in particular.
Regarding the issue of student titles, which continued its downward trend in 2020 (-20%), with 72,306 first titles issued, the most frequent origins for new students are Morocco (12,657), Algeria (6025), China (5048), Tunisia (3998) and Senegal (3576).
The year 2020 was also the year in which Morocco became the first country of origin for people naturalized in France. As in previous years, the countries of origin most affected by the acquisition of French nationality under the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior are Morocco, which takes the lead with 8103 nationals who have become French, and Algeria (7363 acquisitions of French nationality).
Together, the Maghreb countries represent 37.8% of all acquisitions of nationality. The United Kingdom is the first of the European countries but the progression recorded in 2019 (+ 23.8%), in connection with Brexit, is stopped by the Covid in 2020. There are 2,775 Britons who became French in 2020 after 3,557 in 2019.