2023-12-22 08:00:11
The new law on immigration and asylum passed by Parliament on December 19 has weakened the condition of foreigners in France, on the right to asylum, deportations to the border, regularization in professions in shortage, state medical aid. But few debates have focused on the narrowing of land rights that this law brings about. His vote reflects a shift in the political landscape, since it was voted for by 349 votes, including 131 from the Renaissance party (a quarter of the deputies of the presidential majority did not vote for it), 30 votes from the MoDem, 28 votes from Horizons, 62 votes for Les Républicains and 88 votes for the National Rally.
This right-wing shift risks weakening the condition of young people born in France to foreign parents who will once again have to, as was the case when the Pasqua law of 1993 was adopted, take a voluntary step for access to nationality. French in the years preceding their majority, even though they were born and have always lived on the national territory.
This risks accentuating their marking at school and in their identity papers. The Pasqua law was the response to the return of the right to power during the period of cohabitation under François Mitterrand, following a long debate on the reform of nationality law which brought together a commission of wise men in 1988.
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It concluded its work without commenting on the need for reform. This commission was itself the fruit of the inclusion on the agenda by the Clock Club [un think tank réunissant des intellectuels de droite et d’extrême droite], from 1985, of a project aimed at restricting access to French nationality through birth and residence in metropolitan territory for young people from immigrant backgrounds. This project drew its inspiration from the far right of the interwar period.
“Making French people with foreigners”
Successive texts had cast doubt on the allegiance of these young people described as “French papers” not deserving to be fully French: “Being French is earned” they wrote. The right of the soil (or jus soli in Latin) was the law of the Ancien Régime, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment had proposed replacing it with the law of blood (or the right of blood), acquired by descent, considered more emancipatory than this right linking the peasant to the land. Napoleon I, who translated these Enlightenment ideas into the civil code, established blood law.
But, at the end of the 19th century, France, the oldest country of immigration in Europe, lacked population. To better include foreigners established on its soil, wishing to “making French people with foreigners”, according to the terms of the time, and to increase the number of its soldiers in the perspective of a new Franco-German confrontation, it reintroduced land law and widened access to naturalization. A balance was thus established, with the law of 1889, between the right of blood (filiation) and the right of soil (birth and residence in the territory, not from birth but after a period of residence fixed by law ), in the acquisition of nationality.
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