France is the largest country in the European Union by area and has been a major power for many centuries with strong economic, cultural, military and political influence. Being the most visited country in the world, it is without a doubt that France intrigues many foreigners globally.
In France, the first legal definition of the immigrant is given by an International Convention: the International Convention of Rome, in 1924: “Is regarded as immigrant any foreigner who arrives in a country to seek work and in the intention expressed or supposed to settle in a permanent way there; is regarded as simple worker any foreigner who arrives with an only aim of staying temporarily”.
Today, the high Council of integration defines an immigrant as a person born abroad who entered France in this quality in order to settle on the French territory in a durable way. An immigrant can thus be French if it acquired French nationality after his entry in France by naturalization, by marriage or filiation; conversely, a foreigner born in France will not be regarded as immigrant.
Present demographic situation
In the middle of 2004, France counted 4, 9 million immigrants according to INSEE, that is to say 760.000 more than in 1999 and 8, 1% of the total population. 40% of them had the French nationality, which they could have acquired by naturalization or marriage:
• 1, 7 million immigrants, (35% of the immigrants and 2, 7% of the total population) were originating from a European Union country. The progressive fall of the number of Italian, Spanish or Polish immigrants is compensated by the arrival of immigrants coming from other countries. The number of Portuguese immigrants is stable compared to 1999. The immigrants coming from extra community European countries are 250.000, in high rise.
• 1, 5 million immigrants, (31% of the immigrants and 2, 4% of the total population) are originating from North Africa. This number is in rise of 220.000 compared to 1999.
• 570.000 immigrants, (12% of the immigrants and less d'1% of the total population), are coming from sub-Saharan Africa. This figure is in rise of 45% compared to 1999. 2 Africans out of 3 come from old French colonies.
• 830.000 people, (17 % of the immigrants and 1,3 % of the total population), come from the rest of the world, mainly from Asia. The share of Asia, (including Turkey), in the immigrant population is 14 % against 12, 7 % in 1999 and only 3,6 % in 1975.
The passage from an immigration of work, primarily male, to a policy of family regrouping in the middle of the years 1970 involved a growth of the feminization of the immigrant population, within which men and women are today in an equal number. The immigrant population is a little older than the non-immigrant population, because the majority of its members arrived in France after the age of 15 and their children born in France are counted among the non-immigrant residents. The educational level of the immigrants is in clear progression. Today a quarter of the immigrants have a diploma of higher education, (four times more than in 1982). The majority of the immigrants reside in Ile de France (region around Paris) (40%) or in South-east. An inhabitant of the Paris area on six is an immigrant.
Immigration towards France is mainly of African origin (the North and Black Africa). The source of the migrants changes quickly: nearly two thirds come from North Africa, in particular from Algeria and Morocco, against a little more half five years ago.
We can see a fall of the entries on family grounds, passing from 109.800 entries in 2004 (63,1 % of the total) to 102.500 in 2005 (60,8 %). O n the contrary, the entries for reason of work recently increased, passing from 20.900 in 2004 to 22 800 in 2005, (increasing from 12 % to 13,5 %). In spite of a reduction of 16 % of the requests for refuge in 2005 (42 000 new requests), France remained, this year, the OECD countries which recorded the greatest number of requests.
If the figures of foreigners in France remain relatively constant, in spite of a continual arrival of more than 100.000 foreign immigrants, it is that each year a more or less equivalent number of them acquire French nationality.
In 2005, the figure of 155.000 acquisitions of nationality was reached, which carries their number to more than one million since 1999. Until the beginning of 2007, we can say that more than one million a hundred and thousand foreigners became French from 1999 to 2007.
Source INSEE - Acquisition of French nationality according to the mode (June 2004).
Socio-political context of integration policies
The statute of the people of foreign origin knows evolutions, in particular with regard to the acquisition of nationality. At the twentieth century France in theory always refused the principle of the quotas of nationality, however the State asked employers (in particular via General Company of Immigration) to manage the entering populations. Thus in the years 1920, they are the owners of the factories which organize, for example, the trains making come the Poles to France per thousands. These practices continue until the government decides of the closing of the borders and the policy of the family regrouping at the beginning of the years 1970.
The ordinance of November 2, 1945 underlies a durable immigration policy, in particular via the family regrouping, and the acquisition of new rights to the fur and measurement of lengthening the duration of the stay from abroad, supposed to mean his integration. The first important normative instrument is the ordinance of November 2nd 1945 who creates the National office of immigration (OMI) and founds the residence permits of one, five and ten years.
After one period during which the authorities support immigration in order to satisfy the needs for the French economy in years 1960, the economic crisis of years 1970 the growth to set up a control of migratory flows. In 1972 the attribution of a residence permit becomes related to the possession of a title of work and limits the regularizations. In 1974 new immigrations are stopped, except the family regroupings which will form from now on most of legal immigration.
In 1981, the Socialist government proceed to a massive regularization of immigrants in irregular situation, softens the conditions of stay of the immigrants by cancelling the law Bonnet and removes the premium of assistance to the return. In 1984 is founded a single title of stay ten years, dissociated of the title of work. At the same time the government again proposes a help with the reintegration of the immigrant workers in their country of origin. In September 1986 a law is adopted by the French Parliament and it relates to the conditions of entry and of stay from abroad in France, in particular it restricts the access to the chart of resident and facilitates the evictions from abroad in illegal situation.
Legal framework of integration policies
Then that since the law of July 22, 1993 a foreign child born in France was “to express his will” to be naturalized with his majority, a new law restores on May 16, 1998 the automatic acquisition of nationality and reinforces it right of the ground.
In 2003 in November, the law relating to the control of immigration, the stay from abroad in France and nationality again amends from abroad by subordinating the delivery of the chart of resident to a criterion of integration. It also reinforces the fight against clandestine immigration and restricts the application of the system known as the “double sorrow”.
During this time, immigration is treated more and more with the level of European, which adopts thus in 2003 a directive on the family regrouping and tries to harmonize the immigration policies of the Member States. The directive 2003/9/CE of the Council of January 27, 2003 ] set minimal standards for the reception of the applicants of asylum in the States members, all in their leaving a great room for manoeuvre.
In July 2006, law relating to immigration and integration, on the initiative of the Minister of Interior Department, Nicolas Sarkozy carry from 12 to 19 month the time at the end which a foreigner in regular stay in France can request a regrouping for the members of his close family. This law authorizes as the recourse to foreign labour, suspended since 1974, without having to justify as there is no harmful effect with applicants for work in France. This measurement is limited to some professions such as the hotel trade-restoration, construction and public works, seasonal work, and the commercial professions.
The statute of the immigrants is a particularly complex field because of the many modifications which touched the ordinance of November 2, 1945: Entry on the French territory.
International Conventions determine papers which the candidates must present at the entry on the French territory: passport, visa. They must also provide the reason for their arrival and to have financial means to return to their country of origin. The irregular entry and the stay are offences who expose to penal sanctions. Centres for the studies in France (CEF), in course of installation in several countries, organize the arrival of the foreign students in France.
A tourist voyage cannot exceed three months. Beyond three months, the foreigner must profit from a temporary residence permit, granted for less than one year, or of a chart of resident.
The chart of resident, granted for ten years, is renewable full and makes it possible to work and study in France. A foreigner having a French residence permit can remain for three months in space Schengen.
A foreigner can ask to be joined by his spouse and his minors if it has resided in France for at least 18 months under cover of at least a residence permit one year, and that it has sufficient resources to make live his family. It should not be polygamous. The entry of the members of its family can intervene only at the end of a procedure of several months.
As for the acquisition of French nationality, the wife or husband of French can acquire naturalization by declaration after a four years deadline. However, the community of life “as well emotional as material” must not have ceased between the husbands and the foreign spouse must know the French language. The time is increased to five years in certain cases where the couple lived out of France. A child born in France by foreign parents acquires French nationality with his majority if it is remained in France.
Naturalization could also have been granted on decree by the public authority to a major foreigner of moralities and residing in France for more than five years. Contrary to the acquisition of nationality by marriage or filiation, naturalization is not a right but a possibility depending on the decision by the administration.
On 17 February 2001, the freighter East Sea ran aground on the French Riviera with nine hundred Kurds on board, mainly from Syria, after its crew of smugglers abandoned ship. Three years earlier, France had heavily criticized the Italian government when 825 Kurds aboard the ship Ararat landed in the South of Italy. Now France, like Italy, has been forced to acknowledge that it has become a transit country for asylum seekers and illegal migrants trying to make their way to the United Kingdom or northern Europe. Indeed over a third of the East Sea passengers "disappeared" without claiming asylum in France, where they had little chance of success in any case. Their disappearance prompted the ire of Britain's home office secretary Jack Straw, who feared that they were on their way to England. Since 1999, a makeshift camp in the small French town of Sangatte, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, has housed thousands of people wishing to cross the Channel to England by jumping on trucks or trains in Calais. Both the Sangatte camp and the East Sea incident have heightened tensions between the French and British governments over immigration policy.
The beaching of the East Sea also created political tensions within France. France's Socialists, reluctant to appear lenient on migration, called for a firm response to the Kurdish immigrants in order to deter further arrivals. Politicians on the right, by contrast, called for solidarity with a people oppressed by Middle Eastern powers. What France's political elite did agree on was the need for a European solution to the question of immigration and human smuggling. In fact, since the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force in May 1999, immigration and asylum policy has become a European Union matter. EU countries (minus the UK, Ireland, and Denmark which have opted out) and associated Schengen countries (Iceland and Norway) can now adopt unified European legislation in this policy area. France, when it held the presidency of the European Union in the fall of 2000, made a series of proposals to harmonize sanctions against carriers and facilitators of illegal migration. These proposals were adopted by the Council of Ministers under the Swedish Presidency in May 2001.
In the immediate postwar period, France was the only country in Europe to encourage permanent immigration. In this respect its policy resembled that of the United States. Yet, as elsewhere in Western Europe, France's recruitment of new workers halted with the first oil shock in 1973. There were even attempts, under the conservative presidency of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, to reverse the flow of immigrants by refusing to renew their residency permits. These projects failed, primarily because France's public administration used procedural means to block them. Since 1973, immigration policy in France has focused primarily on stemming and deterring migration. This contrasts with the United States, which welcomes large numbers of labor and family migrants. And unlike the United States, where organized business and ethnic interests have lobbied for expansive immigration legislation, France has no organized interest groups advocating greater immigration. Moreover, socioeconomic restructuring and economic downturns since the 1970s have meant that French employers have not needed (legal) foreign labor, while high unemployment has fed xenophobic sentiments in public opinion and in populist rhetoric.
France has nonetheless continued to receive legal immigrants, with approximately 100,000 new entries per year. The legal flows have included EU migrants who enjoy free movement rights, family members of legal residents, whose rights are protected by domestic law, and refugees and asylum-seekers admitted on the basis of constitutional and international law. These are mainly unsolicited migrants, those whose rights of entry and stay are guaranteed by constitutional norms and international agreements. France's Conseil d'Etat, its highest administrative court, has since the late 1970s played a key role in defending these groups. As successive governments have sought to stem migration flows and to issue more expulsion orders, France's high courts have entered the fray of immigration politics. Legal aid groups such as the "Group to Inform and Support Immigrant Workers" have helped the courts in this effort. Together, the courts and the Conseil d'Etat have greatly limited state discretion in the area of migration control.
The latest French census, published in March 1999, showed that there were 3,263,000 foreigners in France (5.6 percent of the total population). This represented a 9 percent decrease in the foreign population since the 1990 census. Although the percentage of foreigners in the French population remains above the EU average of 4.4 percent, France is the only EU member state, and OECD country, where the number of immigrants has decreased over this period.
Part of the decrease is due to the naturalization of about 60,000 foreigners every year, and part is due to mortality. Yet it should be emphasized that one quarter of the foreigners who have entered France since 1990 have since left the country (220,000 out of 850,000 entries since 1990). This high rate of departure is due in part to the weak economic climate in France during much of this period.
Source: OECD, Trends in International Migration, 2000
While these numbers do not point to a migration "crisis" in France, the issue has nonetheless been more highly politicized, and for a longer time, than elsewhere in Europe. Features of the French political system help explain this political attention. First, French electoral laws have encouraged a focus on immigration. Unlike the multi-polar party systems in other continental European countries, which encourage complex coalitions across multiple policy areas, France's winner-take-all electoral system has led the left and right to exaggerate partisan differences. As macroeconomic and industrial policy ceased to be divisive political questions in France—especially with the 1983 policy reversals of François Mitterrand's Socialist party—the political left and right seized on new societal issues such as immigration. After successive national electoral campaigns (legislative and presidential) in which each new government worked to undo previous legislation, France now holds a record for legislative change in the area of immigration. Major reforms were passed in 1980, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1993, 1997, and most recently in 1998. The political debate expanded over time to include the role of immigration in such issues as national identity, migrant incorporation, security, and terrorism. Mobilization of both pro- and anti-migrant forces has fed the political fire. France is the only country to have witnessed a large-scale migrant social movement in each of the past three decades: the migrant workers' rent strikes in the 1970s, the "second generation" movement in the 1980s, and the sans papiers (those without documents) mobilization in the 1990s. Counter-mobilization by the extreme right has also fed the political debate on immigration. It has pushed leading mainstream politicians on the right to address the immigration issue, in order either to win back voters from the far right, or to cause competing parties to lose votes to the National Front.
By the early 1990s, even though immigration in all categories of legal entries had fallen, Jean-Marie Le Pen's extreme-right National Front party was attracting a significant portion of the electorate with its demagogic demand to expel Muslim immigrants from France. Politicians across the political spectrum responded by arguing in favor of "immigration zéro," and the right-wing coalition that came into power in 1993 translated the principle of zero immigration into policy. The "Pasqua law" of 1993, named after French interior minister Charles Pasqua, sought to stem the remaining legal flows in a variety of ways: by prohibiting foreign graduates from accepting job offers by French employers and denying them a stable residence status, by increasing the waiting period for family reunification from one to two years, and by denying residency permits to foreign spouses who had been illegally in the country prior to marrying.
These repressive measures rendered formerly legal migration flows illegal. Thus today, in spite of a partial regularization of undocumented aliens in 1997, there are still many people living in France known as inexpulsables-irrégularisables. This group—including rejected asylum-seekers from countries to which it is not safe to return, and foreign parents of French children—cannot be expelled, yet is not eligible for residency permits. They epitomize the contradictions of liberal democracies in the face of migration pressure, caught between respecting the human rights and norms embedded in domestic and international law, and an electoral logic that leads politicians to adopt a restrictive stance towards immigration.
When Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin came into office in 1997, he chose the prominent political scientist Patrick Weil to write a report, L'immigration et la nationalité, that laid the groundwork for a new immigration law adopted in 1998. Weil argued that the 1993 Pasqua law deterred foreign students and young professionals from settling in France. It thereby deprived the country of a source of human capital and undermined its national interests in the global competition for the brightest minds. Weil's policy recommendations were in fact inspired by the American model, in particular the US visa provisions for highly skilled immigrants. The 1998 law on immigration created a special status for scientists and for scholars. Further measures introduced that year aimed at easing the conditions of entry for certain highly skilled professional categories. Computer experts earning more than 180,000 FF per year, and highly qualified temporary workers earning more than 23,000 FF per month, both benefit from a simplified procedure and, if they obtain a one-year permit, can request family reunification. Despite these reforms, France still appears to lag behind the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in its quest for highly skilled mobile labor.
Three years after the 1998 law on immigration and residency, France's political left and right appear to have agreed not to disagree on immigration, at least at the national level. The new consensus still privileges the restrictive function of immigration policy. And the emerging EU regime on immigration and asylum, negotiated by national interior and justice ministry bureaucrats, is also characterized by a general policy of restrictiveness. Yet, as the East Sea episode has shown, policy instruments such as visas and carrier sanctions that seek to prevent "unwanted" migrants from reaching Europe's border have not stopped their arrival. They have instead criminalized the migration process itself, and raised the demand for smuggling networks and their lucre. France and the European Union today are witnessing the same perverse effects that the US experienced along its Mexican border, where new restrictions in some states only redirected flows to others, and raised the price of illegal passage.
•4,9 millions immigrants (mid 2004) - 8,1 %
•760 000 more than in 1990 - 7,4 %
•increase of 18 % since 1990 against 7 % for the whole population
•960 000 immigrants come to France between 1999 and mid-2004
•More than 25% come from a 25 EU country
•In 2004-2005, 1,7 M immigrants are from a 25 EU country (same figure as in 1999).
•Reduction from Spain, Italy, Poland (- 8 000)
•Other countries + 100 000
•Majority UK: 45 000
•Eastern Europe (non EU) + 37%
250 000 in 2004
•Nb. EU migrants decreasing
57 % in 1975, 49 % in 1999, 40 % mid-2004
•In 2004-2005, 1,5 M immigrants are from North Africa (+ 220 000 / 1999, + 17%).
•Algeria, Marocco: + 200 000
•Other parts of the world: 1,4 M
29 % of the immig. pop. in 2004, 20 % in 1999
Asia 48 %
Turkey 16 %
Sub-Saharan Africa 40 %
570 000 mid 2004, +45% / 1999
7/10 ex-French colonies
•Temporary workers (10 000 since 2001)
•USA, Poland, Brazil, China, Canada, Algeria
•Seasonal workers
•from 100 000 in 80s to 15 000 (1/2 Polish)
•Asylum seeker
•1st country followed by Germany and UK, decrease
•40% of demands from Haiti, Turkey, China, Congo, Sri Lanka or Algeria
•Refugees increase
•5 185 in 2000 up to 13 213 in 2005
•Family immigration predominant but decreasing in 2005 (around 95 000)
•in 2005, foreigners bring 1 456 000 persons to the active population
1 040 000 being employed,
283 000 being unemployed
•North African (618 000 persons) and EU 15 (517 000) : 78 %
•18% in industry, 24% in construction and 54 % in the tertiary sector
•A small part
in 2005, 11 400 persons come to work (7 %)
•Slow increase
7041 in 2004 and 8920 in 2005
3/5 of these immigrant permanent workers already living in France under another status
Reservoir of workforce : women
North African activity rate < 45%, Turkish < 28%.
Every country's immigration laws and trends can be vastly different, do read up a bit more on the requirements for immigration to France to be fully prepared.
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