Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

France has been a major country of immigration for a century and a half, thanks to spontaneous labor migration in the nineteenth century, organized recruitment during and after World War I, and refugee resettlement in the 1920s. By 1931, France's population was nearly 7 percent foreign, and by the 1980s, some 25 percent of French citizens had at least one immigrant grandparent. Almost continuously since 1889 – except during World War II and despite restrictions instituted between 1993 and 1998 – France's liberal nationality laws have allowed children born in France to claim citizenship at adulthood if residency requirements are met. But French society has also confronted periodic waves of xenophobia, and France's colonial past continues to breed social division. France's political tradition downplays cultural differences in the name of an idealized notion of the common good – which, paradoxically, also prevents discrimination from being addressed and hinders the accommodation of religious pluralism in a country where in the early twenty-first century Muslims represent 5–10 percent of the 61 million residents. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France's immigrants came mostly from within Europe. Migration from the overseas empire was heavily restricted until after World War II, when impediments to it became more difficult to sustain. A 1947 law making Algerians “citizens” ... log in or subscribe to read full text