"International Migrations: a Global Issue" Catherine de Wenden, CNRS research director: CERI - Sciences Po. -France is the oldest country of immigration in Europe since its history of migration began in the late 19th century. Before then, travelling merchants, ambassadors or traders, would cross the borders but most of the population did not come from migration. Few migrants arrived in France. However for the first time in the 1851 census, French people and foreigners were counted separately. At the time, there were already 300 000 foreigners in France. In the past, the only foreigners were people who had taken part in revolutions, especially the 1830 and 1848 revolutions. Immigration to France can be explained by the demography. The late 18th, early 19th century, and all through the 19th century until World War I, was characterized by a population decline in France. France started taking birth control measures long before its neighbors. While we were about to enter a period of important growth, the second half of the 19th century, there was not enough manpower. For this reason, and thanks to the progressive facilitation of transportation, especially with trains, immigration developed in France, especially from neighboring countries, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany or Italy. Then we would have more diverse waves of migration as of the 20th century. Among the reasons for this migration was the fact that France was at the end of Europe, a geographical factor. Among the people who intended to go to the United States, some could not find enough money to afford to sail from Le Havre, for instance. So they remained in France and created a transit immigration similar to what exists in Calais or in Morocco, for instance, for people hoping to reach the European continent. The country has an old history of migration. France would also try, not only for demographic or economic reasons, but also military reasons, to turn foreigners into French people. Nationality law as established by the Napoleonic Civil Code was based on filiation. In order to turn foreigners into French people, we widened the possibilities of being naturalized to obtain French citizenship. We would also introduce or reintroduce elements of jus soli, as part of the old laws since farmers were bound to their master's grounds until the French Revolution. Some elements of jus soli were then introduced to allow people born in France from foreign parents to obtain the French nationality. Some balance between jus soli and jus sanguinis was put into place by the 1889 law which would become characteristic of our definition of the access to French nationality. By the end of the 19th century, there were already one million migrants on the eve of the 1900s who would become more diversified during and after World War I. There were people coming for military reasons but who would remain to help reconstruction such as some of the Algerians. New waves appeared after the war, of Polish migrants, for instance, who first arrived after 1918. Italians would be more numerous and become the main group of foreigners in 1932, when there were already three million foreigners. France was by then the main immigration country in Europe. Today we only have 3.7 million foreigners. The proportion of foreigners in the French population was much higher then than it is now. At the time, there were also refugees. First, there were "fuoriusciti", Italian dissidents under Mussolini. Then there were refugees from the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. And France also received people considered stateless, who were White Russians, but also Armenians who arrived en masse in Marseille during and after World War I in addition to people migrating because of the untangling in the great Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires. The migration landscape had become more and more diversified by the time of World War II in a climate in the interwar years where strong anti-Semitism prevailed. After the war, the situation changed. Before, there was not any migration policy per se. Migration policy until 1945 had been up to the employers, to the Immigration National Society, which directly recruited foreigners since they were needed, especially in the industry, the mines and a little in agriculture. The state migration policy only began to flesh out as of 1945. There is a 1945 ordinance which is still valid today regarding foreigner entry and residence. It has been modified a few times but remains at the root of the French migration policy. We go back to what had been done between the wars in 1927, nationality law, in 1945 while making French nationality more accessible and granting new French people more rights, especially the right to vote which had required a long process before. Then came a thirty-year period of economic growth. Between 1945 and 1974, France underwent very strong economic growth in a context where manpower was painfully lacking since the country was still experiencing a population decline. France was a country of elderly people which we tend to forget. Because of the losses from World War I and II, there were fewer births and manpower was then painfully lacking. The approach of the time, as in the interwar period, was to select foreigners based on their capacity to assimilate, as it was called. A study was done by Georges Mauco in 1932 to give an overview of foreigners in France and sort them according to their capacity for work and assimilation. A new study done by the National Institute for Demographic Studies, which had just been created and was headed by Alfred Sauvy, defined a migration policy both for people who were only looking for work and for people looking to stay. Italians, after having been strongly criticized between the wars, had now become desirable according to France's new criteria. However, the flows of Italians were decreasing now that Italy was developing and the Italian economic miracle had begun. After failing at attracting Italians into the country, to integrate and assimilate them, we will have several successive national groups coming as migrant workers. We progressively abandoned the idea of migrants coming to stay and migrants of several different nationalities would follow until 1974. First migrants from Spain, Portugal mostly entered illegally since most did not own a passport. They crossed the Pyrenees. They remain the first group of foreigners in France. There were also migrants from Algeria, who progressively benefited from freedom of circulation. After that, other nationalities followed, Moroccan, Tunisian, Turkish, Yugoslavian migrants thanks to manpower agreements. It was also the beginning of sub-Saharan immigration. Most of these migrants arrived illegally. In 1968, the National Office for Immigration, had a monopoly on recruiting manpower, except for Algerians who fell under the purview of an Algerian Office for Manpower. The ONI only controlled 18% of all entrances. This meant that 82% of migrants entered illegally before undergoing massive regularizations afterwards. By then, we were still in the period of economic growth.
