Une mesure du nombre annuel de nouveaux actifs étrangers en France

From a quantitative point of view, the foreign and immigrant presence in the labor market is well known, thanks to the many official statistical reports. On the other hand, we do not know much about the inflows and outflows which affect the active foreign and immigrant population. The precise objective of this paper is to address that gap in our knowledge. By means of several hypotheses, if we accept an obvious lack of precision, we can approximate the yearly number of foreign entries into the French labor market by establishing an indirect method of estimation through drawing upon and developing information relative, on one hand to the foreign presence in the labour market and, on the other, to the flow of legal foreign nationals’ entries within the scope of permanent immigration. However, since the free circulation agreement between EU countries prevents us from being able to determine the migratory population movement of native Europeans precisely, the indirect measure of the yearly number of new foreign workers can only encompass those from countries outside of this agreement. Despite this limitation, the numerical application from 2007 to 2009 enables us to considerably add to the information needed for a rough estimation of foreigners coming into France.Consequently, we are able to establish that about 130,000 foreign natives from non-EU countries arrived in France as permanent immigrants. Among them, one in ten already had an employment contract in France, and half entered the labour market in the following year. If we add inactive foreigners present in France for several years who gained access to the labour market for the first time, the yearly flow of new active native foreigners from non-EU countries between 2007 and 2009 rises to about 100,000 people—the greatest increase in 20 years.