Selon une enquête de The Worldone in six international students struggles to cover their basic needs. Unlike their French comrades, these young people often do not have access to unemployment insurance or scholarships based on social criteria. This absence of a safety net, coupled with the legal work ceiling of 964 hours per year, pushes some towards the informal sector to survive.
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Leila, a 30-year-old Moroccan student, is one of the faces of this distress. Arriving in France in 2019 to join an engineering school, she saw her situation change during the Covid-19 pandemic. After losing her declared job as an au pair and a debt of 2,000 euros to the Crous, she was evicted from her accommodation. To save her residence permit, she re-registered for a computer science degree, exhausting herself in a multitude of odd jobs.
Things accelerated in February 2024, when the prefecture refused to renew his residence permit for “insufficient academic progress”. Undocumented, Leila found herself unable to sign a legal contract. “With my Moroccan passport, they wouldn’t take me. All I had to do was end up on the street or accept undeclared work,” she confides. She then plunged into a spiral of extreme exploitation.
Under the duress of an employer who knew her vulnerability, the young woman worked up to seventy hours a week for a simple minimum wage. To cover up her 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 housekeeping or childcare assignments unearthed on social networks. She now refuses to talk about her administrative situation for fear of being exploited again. Her future in France remains dependent on a second appeal to obtain her papers, which she describes as “last hope” to complete her studies and escape clandestinity.
