The French government adopted Thursday a bill favoring highly skilled foreigners in a bid to boost the economy.

The bill, passed in a cabinet meeting chaired by French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, would give skilled, non-EU migrants a three-year working visa and facilitate the entry of foreign students if they promise to return home after their diplomas.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who backs the bill, has warned that France is losing out to the United States in attracting qualified migrants in technical and cultural fields.

"France, like its European partners, cannot remain on the sidelines of the global flows of intelligence and skills. Our dynamism, the modernization of our economy depends on it," he told the French right-wing Le Figaro newspaper.

"Neither France nor its European partners can be satisfied with a situation where the elites from developing countries head massively to the United States or Canada, while the European continent receives an under-qualified immigration," Sarkozy wrote.

The plan would also "contribute to forming a network of Francophile elites in the world", he added.

Sarkozy urged the measures to be adopted EU-wide, to ensure that temporary immigrants to France did not simply take their qualifications and know-how to another EU country after their visa term was up.

The law bill is to be debated in the next few months at the French parliament.

The left-wing opposition criticized the bill for putting more restrictions on the right to French residency through marriage or family reunion reasons -- currently the country's two main sources of legal immigration -- and for putting economic priorities over family and social factors..

France last year took in 164,000 immigrants. Many of them come from North Africa, such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

Source: Xinhua