The Muslims in France and the French Model of Integration

"France is all the French," once said General de Gaulle. Some among those French are Muslims. Most of them are immigrants or the French-born second-generation children of immigrants. For the most part they live among traditional French working families with whom they are competing for jobs in poor and marginalized suburbs. How will the French secular state, the majority of whose population is of the Christian tradition, integrate a substantial Muslim population that by and large is willing to become part and parcel of the French mainstream? According to the French High Council of Integration, France is home to 4 million to 5 million Muslims—defined by culture rather than religious observance—of whom up to half have French citizenship. Of the Muslim total, almost 3 million are of North African origin or ancestry, with 1.5 million from Algeria, 1 million from Morocco, and the rest from Tunisia. Of the other Muslims, Turks probably number about 350,000, sub-Saharan Africans about 250,000, and assorted Middle Easterners (Iranians and Kurds, as well as Arabs) the remainder. France's Muslims make up at most one in twelve of the population—and its Arabs one in twenty.

France has long been a country of immigration, and is likely to remain so. However, the immigrant population is remarkably stable. In the latest census, in 1999, immigrants numbered 4.3 million and made up some 7.4 percent of the population (overseas territories excluded). This proportion has been more or less constant for a quarter century. More than one-third of the immigrants have taken French citizenship.¹ Immigration proper, that is, the settlement of foreigners on French territory, dates back to the nineteenth century. Even if xenophobic campaigns in reaction to immigration occurred at all periods, the newcomers were eventually assimilated in the medium or the long term, and their demographic contribution to French society was positive—even essential—until the third quarter of the twentieth century. A third wave of immigration started in 1956 and swelled rapidly, and by 1976 the number of immigrants had reached 3.7 million (7 percent of the total population). Then the economic slump of the mid-1970s put an end to the growth of legal immigration flows. For the first time, immigration posed to France as a nation a kind of colonial problem planted within itself, triggering strong political reactions that tended to overshadow complex phenomena of mutual repulsion. And yet the immigrants as a whole have definitely contributed to French economic growth, to the shift of the French proletariat toward a middle-class outlook, and to the general welfare of the country. Paying back the immigrants' contribution at the cost of a few sacrifices would be only fair, notes Fernand Braudel.² Of course, immigration has become heavily politicized and is an issue in elections. It has accordingly been seen as representing a danger to civil peace, the unity of the country, and even the very existence of the French national community. Conversely, it has been considered an expression of the founding values of the political community by giving it a universal dimension: human rights, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

France's immigration policy has been at the crossroads of three considerations:

1. 1. First is a logic of values, of political principles that distinguishes among political asylum, labor migration, and population immigration, and guarantees residence to the immigrant.

2. 2. Second is a logic of demographic politics, based on the principle that France needs population to remain or become again a world power. Young people likely to start families or with young families are welcome. Their children, born in France or coming at an early age, will be raised and educated in France. Furthermore, some demographers differentiate among the ethnic groups that are more likely to be integrated—or assimilated—into French society.

3. 3. Third is an economic logic, which is looking for male, single, flexible, usually low-paid workers—preferably in good health—who can adapt to the contradictory needs of the various economic sectors.³

In a nutshell, French immigration policy has...