France: new immigration laws (1)
01 January 1991
France: new immigration laws
artdoc July=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