PARIS, Dec 29: The Observatoire Francais des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE), in a report published this week, has recommended to the French government to attract more qualified immigrants, especially if it wants to maintain its economic growth.

The OFCE says that France should henceforth think in terms of at least doubling the present number of immigrants it allows into the country.

Although the report does not go so far as demand that France immediately open up its frontiers to immigrants, it does recommend that the French government undertake “immediately a debate on the economic and demographic aspects of immigration.”

French governmental sources say that they do plan to broach the subject of the need for new qualified immigrants, and that the debate will certainly accompany introduction of a new law on immigration expected for early next year.

One of the reasons why the OFCE report proposes that France open up its frontiers again to immigrants is that, according to one of its authors, OFCE researcher Alexis Dantec, France’s active population is expected to decline starting in 2007 for the 20-59 year-old active population, and from 2012 for that aged between 20 and 64.

Dantec says that the French population as a whole, and notably the younger generation, that aged up to 20 years, will begin to decline only starting in 2040.

The “depopulation” of France, as it is characterized by Dantec, “is very well synonymous with the absolute reduction of France’s demographic and economic importance in the world.”

And although Mr Dantec admits that new immigrants “bring only a limited and partial answer” to the problem of depopulation, and France’s decline as a world power, it nevertheless “permits us to inverse the tendency to depopulation” that the country should soon start to experience, and that therefore “the contribution of immigration to correcting the problem of the aging of the active population should certainly not be neglected.”

For example, says the OFCE report, “a simple doubling of the net flow of immigrants into France would suffice to allow us to conserve in the long term a population that is active and constant, and also allow us to compensate, if only partially so, the overall aging of the population.”