Immigrants’ Children Spark Citizenship Battle in France

French legislators this week fought over one of the most divisive and acrimonious questions in this country’s political life: what it takes for a person to be considered French.

In the tightest legislative battle of its six-month rule, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s government moved a step closer to sweeping away most, but not all, of the legal distinctions between the children of French citizens and those of foreigners living in France.

After a marathon debate in the National Assembly, and angry and outraged objections from right-wing lawmakers, legislators on Monday narrowly approved a bill that, if it clears Parliament, will grant automatic nationality to children born in France of non-French parents once the youths reach the age of 18.

In the United States, any child born on American territory automatically becomes a U.S. citizen.

But in France, following tough legislation passed in 1993 under the former conservative government, French-born offspring of foreigners have had to apply for citizenship between the age of 16 and 21.

Foes call that existing law discriminatory and racist; proponents say that becoming a citizen should not be a mere “accident of birth.”

It sounds like an abstruse issue mainly of concern to jurists or lexicologists trying to define the term “nation.”

But the status of immigrants’ children has become a hot-button issue in a country where foreigners are blamed by many for chronically high unemployment and rising crime, and where Islam has become the second-leading religion after Roman Catholicism.

The often unspoken subtext is the fear that the historic French population is at risk of being diluted, even submerged, by brown and black immigrants from France’s former African colonies and their progeny.

Such suspicions have boosted popular support for the far-right National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose candidates won more than 15% of the vote in June’s parliamentary elections.

Government statistics, though, indicate that the percentage of immigrants has been roughly stable for more than half a century: from 6.6% of the total in 1931 to 7.4% in 1990, when the most recent census counted 4,166,000 foreign-born residents.

Although the proposed change in the law would grant automatic citizenship to children of foreign-born residents when they reach legal adulthood at 18, there is one proviso: The child must have lived in the country for at least five years after his or her 11th birthday, either continuously or in total.

Youngsters 13 years of age or older could apply for citizenship under the new law if their parents concur and the children fulfill the five-year residency requirement. Teenagers could reject French nationality in the six months leading up to or the year after they reach 18.

The vote this week in the National Assembly was no triumph for the government. The bill championed by Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou squeaked through, 267-246, with many Communist and Green allies of the Socialists abstaining because of the distinctions it preserves between the two categories of children.

Guy Hascoet, a Green member of the Assembly, accused the government of taking its lead from Le Pen’s forces, who want to deport foreigners en masse.

Saleh Teiar, a spokesman for immigrants who lack residency permits, objected that “with the Guigou law, once again suspicion rules when it comes to immigration.”

The measure now must go to the Senate, where opponents of the government predominate.

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From France’s 1990 census:

* Total population: 56.6 million

* Citizens at birth (both born in France and abroad): 51.2 million

* Foreigners born in France, then naturalized: 472,000

* Foreigners born in France, not naturalized: 739,000

* Immigrants born abroad, then naturalized: 1.3 million

* Immigrants who have not acquired French nationality: 2.8 million

Source: “France, a Social Portrait” by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies.