France: foreign students trapped

According to a survey by Le Monde, one international student in six struggles to cover their basic needs. Unlike their French counterparts, these young people often do not have access to unemployment insurance or means-tested scholarships. This lack of a safety net, coupled with the legal ceiling of 964 hours of work per year, pushes some into the informal sector to survive.

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Leila, a 30-year-old Moroccan student, is one of the faces of this distress. Arrived in France in 2019 to join an engineering school, her situation deteriorated during the Covid-19 pandemic. After losing her declared job as an au pair and owing 2,000 euros to the Crous, she was evicted from her housing. To save her residence permit, she re-enrolled in a computer science degree, exhausting herself in a multitude of odd jobs.

The downward spiral accelerated in February 2024, when the prefecture refused to renew her residence permit for "insufficient academic progress". Without papers, Leila found herself unable to sign a legal contract. "With my Moroccan passport, they wouldn’t take me. I was left with either ending up on the street or accepting undeclared work," she confides. She then plunged into a spiral of extreme exploitation.

Under the constraint of an employer who knew her vulnerability, the young woman worked up to seventy hours a week for a mere minimum wage. To cover his activities, her boss forced her to use a false identity and housed her in a 10-square-meter studio. "I felt like a slave," denounces the student. When she finally demanded a reduction in her working hours, she was fired on the spot.

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Today, Leila survives thanks to precarious cleaning or childcare missions found on social networks. She now refuses to talk about her administrative situation for fear of being exploited again. Her future in France remains suspended to a second appeal to obtain her papers, which she describes as her "last hope" to complete her studies and emerge from clandestinity.