2023-11-09 03:00:04
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, during a debate on the “immigration” bill in the Senate, in Paris, November 6, 2023. LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
This is a provision that the government did not consider in the first version of its immigration bill, but which it did not oppose in substance before the Senate on Wednesday, November 8. Dominated by the right and the center, the Luxembourg Palace finally ratified a substantial modification of land law, introduced in the law committee a few months earlier.
Today, young people born in France to foreign parents automatically obtain French nationality upon reaching the age of majority. This soil law only assumes that the young person resides in France, and arises from a republican conception of nationality based on “socialization more than on an ethnic basis”underlined the historian Patrick Weil in a report to the government, in 1997, on nationality legislation.
The Senate voted on Wednesday to remove this automaticity, by requiring young people to apply to become French in order to be naturalized. “Any child born in France to foreign parents can, from the age of 16 and until the age of 18, acquire French nationality provided that they express the desire to do so”, adopted the senators, on the proposal of the senator (Les Républicains, LR) of Bouches-du-Rhône, Valérie Boyer. And they add that a young person cannot acquire nationality “if he has been sentenced to a sentence equal to or greater than six months’ imprisonment”.
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Enough to make many associations and unions jump – such as SOS-Racisme, the Human Rights League, the UNSA, the CFDT or the CGT – who had, in a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, on November 5, worried about a “degree of restriction on the benefit of land rights unknown since the regime established in… 1804”year of promulgation of the civil code by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Fight against a possible draft
“Access to nationality promotes immigration”defended Valérie Boyer, Wednesday in session, while the senator (Reconquest!) of Bouches-du-Rhône Stéphane Ravier castigated a right of the ground ” stupid ” and estimated, regarding naturalized foreigners, that“a calf born in a stable will never turn it into a horse” – xenophobic remarks which earned him a point of order.
In 2021, 130,000 people obtained French nationality. “Acquisitions of nationality by advance declaration and without formalities, which concern foreign minors born in France to foreign parents, represented 26.9% of the totalspecified the Senate Law Committee in its report on the text. These relatively favorable conditions of access to nationality for minors can potentially strengthen the attractiveness of French territory”. It is therefore to fight against a possible draft that the senators set about restricting land law.
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