France: new immigration laws
01 May 1993
On 11 May 1993 the French national assembly began debating changes to French nationality law, part of a wide-ranging package of proposals on nationality and immigration put forward by France's new Interior Minister Charles Pasqua to, "stop illegal immigration and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism". The Gaullist-RPR veteran, architect, in 1986, of a notorious law on immediate expulsions which did away with judicial control and led to mass deportations, lost no time in bringing the proposals to the assembly, having announced them just three weeks before, immediately on taking office under the new right-wing administration.
The package of assaults on immigrants' rights includes the restoration to the police of widely abused powers to stop, search and check the papers of those "suspected of being illegally in France". In practice the powers are a carte blanche for the police to harass black people at will. Visa officers overseas will be instructed to "separate genuine visitors from would-be immigrants" and will have more unreviewable powers to refuse visas. Identity cards are to be made forgery-proof, residents' visas are to be introduced, and expulsion made easier, so that illegal residents can be deported "en masse" to their countries of origin.
Further proposals in the package include an attack on family reunion by giving mayors the right to refuse family visits on the ground that the conditions of the proposed visit are "not compatible with municipal urbanisation objectives"; a ban on marriage in France on those who do not have permission to live there; and an extension of the "probationary period" before which citizenship can be claimed on the basis of marriage from six months to two years.
But the attack on the right of those born in France to French citizenship is symbolically the most important. For a century, those born in France of foreign parents have become French nationals automatically at 18 if they have lived in France for five years, unless they decline French citizenship, and the parents have a right to register their French-born children as French citizens at any time during their childhood. The proposed law puts the burden on the would-be citizen to apply between the ages of 16 and 21, and gives the authorities more discretion to refuse on grounds of character and criminal convictions. It also removes the right of parents to request citizenship for their children, on the ground that this right was abused by illegal immigrants who thereby acquired the right to remain in France themselves.
The proposals are the culmination of the Right's anti-immigrant and anti-Arab project, and are much influenced by the fascist Front Nationale. The right to French citizenship by birth on French territory (ius soli) has come under attack from the parliamentary right led by Jacques Chirac. In 1988 a government commission put forward the modified nationality proposals and Pasqua got them through the Senate in 1990.
Government's racism
Pasqua's Immigration Minister, Jean-Claude Barreau, an ex-Socialist Party member, has written virulent pamphlets on the threat to French nationhood posed by the immigration of Muslims. He claims that the statistics on immigrants in France grossly understate the numbers of those in the country, because those who "prefer not to declare their presence disappear from the statistics", and that they hide, too, the "link between immigration and unemployment". The anti-immigrant project receives the wholehearted support of the right-wing press, which gleefully reiterates ministerial complaints of the laxity of the Socialists' immigration policies, and their statements that 80% of expulsion orders are not implemented and that one-third of drug cases involve immigrants.
But the measures owe a lot to the example of the UK government which paved the way in draconian measures of control through the investigation of marriages and restrictions on family reunion, and by modifying the "i