Immigration and Insecurity in France

Jane Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754635833
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351928489
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The importance of the immigration issue in French politics has been highlighted by the success of Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right Front National party, in reaching the second round of the presidential elections. This absorbing book closely examines the debate over immigration in contemporary France, looking not only at the development of immigration and nationality policies, but also at the changing discourse on the integration of immigrants. It analyzes the continuing racialization of discourse on immigration and anti-Islamic sentiment arising from the 'Islamic headscarf affair'. The work addresses issues such as the gendered nature of immigration and pays particular attention to the experiences of women immigrants in France. This careful analysis is then placed within the context of developments in the EU towards creating a unified immigration and asylum policy.

Chapter 1
Conceptions of Immigration and Citizenship

In the May 2002 French presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the Front National, running on an electoral platform of which anti-immigration policies were a major part, received almost seventeen per cent of the vote in the first round, eliminating the Socialist candidate, and the then Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. In beating Jospin in the first round of the elections, Le Pen qualified to go through to the second round run-off against the incumbent president Jacques Chirac. Le Pen was soundly defeated by Chirac in the second round, but his success in the first round shocked and surprised many in France, who had tolerated the Front National as a political presence since the beginning of the 1980s when they first began to have an electoral impact, but had not realised the extent of their popular support. Indeed, that a candidate standing on a platform based largely on anti-immigration measures could gain so many votes, shocked not only the French, but many around Europe and the world. In fact, however, Le Pen's performance should not have come as that great a surprise. Immigration has been a subject of heated debate in France for many years, and it may be argued that both the Left and the moderate Right have contributed to the success of the Front National by their failure to confront Le Pen's anti-immigration diatribes, and further, that they have in fact taken a more and more hard line stance on immigration in response to the perceived electoral appeal of the Front National's policies. The assumption amongst politicians from other parties has been that the Front National poses a real problem in terms of electoral politics because they have addressed the issue of immigration which is a real crisis, and a dangerous one for France. The Socialist Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, declared in a television interview as early as 1985, for example, that: 'The Le Pen phenomenon comes from real questions, to which the extreme-Right brings the wrong answers' (Le Monde, 29 October 1985). Other politicians and the media have echoed this sentiment that the Front National is asking the right questions (even if they may provide the wrong answers) and that immigration is one of the major problems facing contemporary French society. Jacques Chirac, the current President of France, declared in 1991 when he was mayor of Paris, that he felt sorry for the residents of working class districts of Paris who lived next door to immigrants. He talked about the French man:

who sees his next door neighbour - a family where there is one father, three or four wives and twenty-odd kids, getting fifty thousand francs in social security payments without going to work; add to the noise and the smell and it drives the French worker crazy. It's not racist to say we can no longer afford to reunite families

(cited in Marcus, 1995: 93).

The use of such blatant racist stereotyping - smelly, noisy immigrant families with large numbers of children, living off the French social security system - may be more typical of the Far-Right, but the fact that such images could be employed by a leader of the largest moderate Right-wing party, then mayor of Paris, and now President of France, demonstrates to what extent the treatment of immigration and immigrants as a 'problem' for the French state and the French people has been normalised. Immigrants are frequently linked with problems of crime, unemployment, and a general 'insecurity' in French society. The number of immigrants, and particular illegal immigrants is consistently overstated, and recently there has been huge debate over the issue of the 'sans-papiers' (literally those 'without papers' who have been resisting deportation from France), and over asylum seekers (and particularly the Sangatte camp which was a subject of controversy between France and the UK). The way in which immigration has been problematised in this fashion, has meant that successive governments have pursued stricter and stricter policies aiming to reduce the number of immigrants coming into France, to return those perceived to be residing in France 'illegally', and to push for the further 'integration' of those immigrants who have a legal right to stay in France. Immigration has become an issue that is now perceived very much in terms of 'security', both in terms of the need to limit entrance to the country and in terms of the push to further integrate settled migrants and ethnic minority communities. The threat to national security posed by immigration is perceived as manifold. Immigration has been linked with economic difficulties - unemployment and deficits in the welfare budget, rising crime, the threat of terrorism. More fundamentally, perhaps, immigration has been seen as a threat to the very basis of national social and political cohesion, undermining French national identity and thus calling the nation-state itself into question. Paradoxically, whilst the debate over immigration, has portrayed policies and legislation designed to limit immigration as safeguarding France's security, it might be argued that these same laws and policies have created an increasingly vulnerable and insecure situation for many of those of immigrant origin currently living in France. And not only has the security of immigrants been affected negatively by increasingly exclusionary policies, the very construction of the discursive boundaries between the French 'us' and the foreign 'them' in current rhetoric and debates over immigration have had an effect in increasing insecurity for migrant and ethnic minority communities living on French territory.

The rest of this chapter will explore the history of France's attitudes to and conceptions of migrants in the post-War period and will go on to examine the ways in which migrants rights and experiences have been shaped by changes in discourse on immigration. It will examine the debate over the creation of a post-national citizenship, and argue that current attitudes and policies towards immigration show in fact the limits of the development of such a post-national citizenship status.

Immigration and the French Nation

The problematisation of the immigration issue and the continuing politicisation of the discourse and debate around immigration and French nationality highlight some seemingly contradictory tendencies within the discourses of nationhood and citizenship in France, and point to discontinuities in the incorporation of non-national residents which would seem to challenge the thesis of a developing postnational citizenship (for a fuller discussion of the concept of postnational citizenship see below). French attitudes to and policies towards immigration can be seen as paradoxical in that whilst in perception and in reality France has been one of the foremost countries of immigration in Europe, it has resisted movements towards multiculturalism or towards any formal acknowledgement of the multiethnic nature of its society. As Walzer argues in his study of 'regimes of toleration', France is a complicated case because: 'Far more than any other country France has been a society of immigrants. And yet it isn't a pluralist society - or at least it doesn't think of itself, and it isn't thought of, as a pluralist society' (Walzer, 1997: 38). And although it might be argued that in recent years France has become more and more of a pluralist society, this paradoxical tension between high levels of immigration and an attachment to an assimilationist Republican tradition might be argued to continue, complicating many of the debates surrounding migration and migration policy in contemporary France. Indeed, the debate over immigration can be seen as part of a greater debate about the nature of the French nation-state itself, a nation-state which some have argued is in crisis (Silverman, 1992).

Traditionally France has perceived itself both as a defender of individual rights and a country of immigration, willing to grant citizenship and rights to those who wished to become French. In fact, France has traditionally had greater immigration than other European countries, encouraging immigrants to make up for its low birth rate and lack of workforce. Research published by the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED), highlights the importance of immigration in the constitution of the French population:

The proportion of people born in France with at least a parent or grand-parent who immigrated in the past one hundred years is about twenty per cent. Of those of foreign origin, eighty per cent are French from birth. Thus immigration has not only actively supported the demography of France but has also contributed to a greater diversity of the population

(Tribalat, 1991: 71).

For centuries, immigrants have made up an important part of the French working class, and in particular the unskilled, industrial workforce (Noiriel, 1988). And from the mid-Nineteenth Century onwards, immigration became a massive phenomenon as the beginning of real industrialisation proved how much France needed foreign workers to supplement its own workforce, with governments as well as industrial leaders actively encouraging immigration. As Georges Mauco, a demographer commented in 1932: 'Only the introduction of new elements, coming from the outside, would be sufficient to nourish the demographic and economic structure of the country. It was clear that immigration, mass immigration, and essentially working-class immigration, was a necessity' (Mauco, 1932).

In fact, although governments took responsibility for organising the diplomatic relations surrounding immigration, and for signing conventions with neighbouring European countries to govern migration into France¹, the actual recruitment of foreign workers was handled by a specialised private organisation, the Societe generate d'immigration (SGI) (Weil, 1991). This delegation for the organisation of the practicalities of immigration away from political institutions and towards private labour-market institutions demonstrates the way that immigration was perceived primarily as a labour market issue, and one to be resolved by employers, with government controlling only the very high-level diplomatic issues involves. However, although employers' needs for labour seem paramount in propelling the demand for immigrant labour, immigration was not perceived solely as the importation of labour for French industry, but also as closely linked to the necessity of repopulation of the country - necessary for productivity but also for defence and security. France had continual worries about under-population, and as pro-natalist policies achieved little tangible result, immigration was seen as one solution to the problem of re-populating the country The migratory phenomenon was so great during the first decades of the Twentieth Century that during the 1920s France was one of the foremost countries of immigration in the world on a per capita basis (Wihtol de Wenden, 1988) and by 1930 France counted proportionally more foreigners amongst its population than the United States (Weil, 1991).

This massive migration created growing difficulties, however, for the French Republican tradition. This tradition which was a product of the 1789 Revolution emphasizes the importance of popular sovereignty, equality and individual rights. Republicanism was favourable to migration in so far as it embraced an open nationalism based on political unity which provided the potential for foreigners to become French citizens if they were willing to adopt French nationality together with language, culture and political traditions. Republican conceptions of the nation also, however, indicated the need for a high degree of cultural unity, and it was here that contradictions began to arise. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, the Republican elements in French politics were attempting to definitively impose their control on the state, and an important part of this campaign consisted in the imposition of cultural unity in the form of a centralised and secular Republic with one language (as opposed to many regional languages) and a unified culture. This campaign was not aided by the introduction of new and diverse populations in the form of labour migrants. As Weil argues, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards there was a growing contradiction 'between the migratory phenomenon which was becoming massive but necessary - for economic interests, and more particularly for big industries, for the power of the nation faced with Germany, and perhaps also for its socio-political stability -, and a process of social construction of the nation "France" which, in order to transcend local specificities and class differences, entrenched common language and homeland in schools, created the identity card, introduced timidly but progressively new social rights reserved for nationals, and thus produced a distinction between national and immigrants' (Weil, 1991: 28).

Post-war migration to France has followed the pattern of many other Northern European countries. This pattern can be described, following Messina, in three broad waves: a first wave of workers including colonial migrants and supposedly 'temporary' guestworkers from the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia, to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding economy; a second wave of spouses and dependents after the closing of doors to labour migration in 1974; and a third wave in the 1980s and 1990s of legitimate and illegitimate refugees and illegal immigrants (Messina, 1996). More recently, as Hansen points out, could be added a new wave, not of inward migration itself, but of mobilisation of illegal immigrants resisting efforts to expel them, and claiming citizenship rights (Hansen, 1999). This mobilisation of the so-called 'sans-papiers' has been central to the contemporary politics of migration in France, prompting widespread discussion about the role of migrants and the nature of citizenship (Terray, 1997).

The first post-war wave of migration lasted from the end of the Second World War until the suspension of labour migration in 1974. During this period, France again experienced massive immigration fuelled both by the recruitment of 'temporary' migrant workers, and by migration schemes and programmes for those from France's (ex)-colonies, the two threads of migration proving complexly interlinked. In the years immediately after 1945 migration was mainly from other European countries - principally Spain and Italy - but the pattern of immigration gradually shifted as more and more immigrants arrived from France's colonies and ex-colonies (particularly Algeria). The regulation of immigration in this post-war period indicates both an expansionist element based on France's continuing need for migrant labour and her desire to boost her population (INED projected that France would need at least 5.3 million permanent immigrants), and also a growing awareness of the ethnic composition of migrant flows and the growing contradictions becoming apparent in the Republican assimilationist view. Some demographers such as Georges Mauco, head of the Haut Comité consultatif de la Population et de la Famille, had already drawn up categorisations of the most and least desirable immigrants based on criteria of their perceived assimilability into French society, thus creating a conceptual model of the demographic analysis of immigrant populations based on notions of assimilation and on ethnic categories (Bertaux, 2000). Mauco's categorisation was officially vetoed by the Conseil d'Etat, but there remained an implicit preference for immigrants from other European countries. The Office National dTmmigration (ONI), created in 1945 to encourage and regulate immigration, located offices outside France in Italy, Spain and later Portugal, to encourage immigrants from these countries. However, the ONI, could not supply the demand for labour quickly enough, and many employers recruited workers directly from other countries, without official checks, or legal papers. Most of these workers were later 'regularized'. In fact, the government recognised the need for 'illegal' immigration outside the official channels of the ONI, to increase immigrant flows and thus to ensure an adequate supply of labour and to ease pressure on wages. In 1963, the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, stated clearly that: 'Immigration is a means of creating a certain breathing space in the labour market and of resisting social pressures' (cited in Marie, 1988: 77). And Jean-Marcel Jeanneney, the minister for labour argued in a press release in March 1966 that: 'Illegal immigration is not without its uses because if we stuck to a strict application of international agreements we might face a labour shortage.'²

The huge need for immigrants meant that despite the underlying criteria of cultural preference, more and more immigrants came from North and Sub-Saharan Africa and from Asia. This was particularly the case for Algeria, as a law of 1947 had given Algerians the right to French citizenship and the Evian Accords of 1962 which granted Algeria independence, guaranteed free movement and residence for Algerians in mainland France. Successive governments tried to impose restrictions on the influx of Algerians as it became clear that this would be on a massive scale, but these quotas were limited in their effect. Similarly, there were attempts to control the flows of immigrants from France's ex-colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, although these were small at the time. There was a recognition, however, that migration from within Europe would not be enough to meet the needs of French industry and France signed agreements with Morocco and Tunisia to regulate labour immigration from these two countries. Thus in the years between the end of the Second World War and the official suspension of labour migration in 1974, it became clear to all that non-European migration was not only necessary but also inevitable. By 1975, the year after this suspension, the proportion of the immigrant population in France of European origin was only 67.2 per cent of the total immigration population, whilst immigrants from Africa accounting for 28.0 per cent of the total (and Algerians 14.3 per cent) (INSEE, 1997).

The decision to halt labour migration in 1974 can be seen as both an economic and an electoral choice. The decision was taken as a result of the economic recession which followed the 1973 oil crisis, and growing unemployment within France which lessened the need for migrant labour. At the same time there was evidence of growing tension and xenophobia within France and thus electoral pressure for some kind of control of immigration. Already the lack of social infrastructure to cope with immigrant populations was proving problematic, particularly a lack of adequate housing. The fact that many employers had recruited workers directly and not through the ONI meant that they had not been obliged to find accommodation for these workers, and with no houses to go to they were forced to find their own shelter. As a result bidonvilles (shanty towns) sprung up on the fringes of cities with large immigrant populations. The construction of public housing to get rid of these shanty towns also caused problems, tending to lead to the concentration of immigrant populations in working-class neighbourhoods (Money, 1999). Anti-immigrant sentiments became increasingly apparent and sometimes resulted in violence. North Africans were attacked in Paris suburbs and anti-immigrant riots broke out in Marseille in 1973 leading to the death of eleven Algerians (Weil, 1991). It was thus a conjuncture of economic and social pressures, together with the desire for electoral appeal which led the Secretary of State for Immigration, Andre Postel-Vinay, to announce a temporary stop on labour migration in July 1974. The suspension was make permanent in October of the same year. The government also attempted to suspend immigration for family reunification but a huge mobilisation of associations defending immigrants' rights convinced them that they could not practically or ethically maintain this ban on family reunification (Weil, 1991). Thus as a report for the OECD suggests, the reasons for the suspension of immigration were complex and went further than simple economic logic: 'These unilateral measures, that to some might appear, over time, to be linked to the energy crisis and to the international financial difficulties, were inspired by essentially political motives ... Everything happened as if the approach of a conjunctural recession, more anticipated than felt, as well, constituted an occasion and served to get accepted, restrictive decisions taken based on the social and political situation.' (cited in Wihtol de Wenden, 1988: 191).

However, despite the decision to officially suspend labour migration, and despite government efforts to limit other types of migration and to encourage reverse migration of the supposedly 'temporary' migrant workers, France, like other European countries experienced what Hansen has termed a 'spectacular instance of cross-national policy failure' (Hansen, 1999: 417), in that very few of the migrant workers who had arrived did in fact return to their countries of origin, and moreover, they were in many cases joined by families and dependents. Thus a second wave of migration developed based around the arrival of these families and dependents of the migrant workers who settled in France. Differing explanations have been offered for the way in which patterns of migration developed in Europe, and for the general failure of governments to limit migration or to successfully implement return migration. Hollifield (1992, 1999) has argued that the autonomy of national governments in restricting immigration was limited by an embedded liberalism entrenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptions of Immigration and Citizenship
• 2 The Development of Immigration Policy in a European Context
• 3 Refugee and Asylum Policy: Heading for a Crisis?
• 4 The Sans-Papiers Movement: Mobilisation Through Illegality
• 5 Immigrants' Rights: The Changing Boundaries of Citizenship
• 6 Women Immigrants and Asylum Seekers: Facing a Double Burden of Insecurity
• 7 The Affaire des Foulards: Islam, Integration and Secularism
• 8 Racism and Discrimination: A Failure of Anti-Racism in France?
• Bibliography
• Index