General points

France has been a country of immigrants for a long time, with two major waves arriving in the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-sixties. After the First World War, Belgians, Poles, Italians, North Africans and Indochinese arrived to boost the labour force, which had been severely affected by the loss of 1.4 million young men and the large number of war wounded. After 1945, Spaniards, Portuguese, African and, more especially, North Africans, were encouraged to immigrate to overcome labour shortages and meet the needs of a booming economy. After 1974, the economic crisis led to the official end of immigration, except for family reunification and asylum procedures.

It is difficult to know the exact number of immigrants, because immigrants’ children born in France are French. The latest population census in 1999 showed 4,310,000 immigrants from the most diverse range of origins. They account for 7.4% of the population, a proportion that has been the same since 1975. More than one in three immigrants holds French nationality and the number of naturalisations doubled in ten years.

In the past, immigrants were mainly men who came to fill manpower needs. Today, immigration is often the result of family reunification and there is now parity between male and female immigrants. Nearly two out of three immigrants live in a town with more than 200,000 inhabitants; only 3% live in rural areas and 37% live in the greater Paris area.

Male immigrants are mainly manual workers in construction, the car industry and business services, whereas female immigrants are more likely to be employed in direct personal services. This means that immigrants suffer from higher unemployment than the rest of the population and women immigrants more than men.

Immigrant women’s access to the labour market has brought about sweeping changes in immigrant lifestyles. More and more working foreign women adopt the attitudes of French women and upset the traditional role models for men and women in their country of origin. Young women do better at school and find jobs more easily. As adults, more of them dare enter a mixed marriage or even live as an unmarried couple. They use birth control, they have fewer children and they are older when they give birth. These women encourage their children in their schoolwork; so much so that immigrants’ children do just as well at school as children of French parents. Mastery of the French language, which depends on how long the children have been in France, is a key factor for success at school.

The problems immigrants encounter are more frequently cultural difficulties: religion, codes of conduct and authority structures within families and groups are not always compatible with a different cultural environment.

Most immigrants overcome these problems by creating an intermediate identity for themselves that reconciles their original identity and their integration into French society. For example young Beurs, North African youths born in France to immigrant parents, speak Arabic to their parents, but French is considered to be their mother tongue. They observe some religious practices, such as Ramadan and dietary laws. They are familiar with French cultural codes, but they have not abandoned the culture of their parents. Unlike other countries in Europe, there is a genuine mixing of populations in France.

However, this image of silent integration of the majority of immigrants is tarnished by problems in some suburban areas. In the nineteen-seventies, native-born French moved out of the suburban housing projects, to buy their own homes in more comfortable areas in most cases. Immigrant families took their place in the housing projects, but with the increase in unemployment and the economic crisis, the situation deteriorated. Violence appeared and racist crimes and incidents occurred more frequently. Some immigrants reject integration and some 20% seek the promise of a better world through fundamentalist Islam.

Sport has become a means of integration. In it, young people born to immigrant parents find a structure, a healthy way of life, a set of rules to live by and a means of identifying with their local community. They may also make a successful career of sport. More and more young people born to immigrant parents are now in professional sports.

Immigrants by country of birth