France: No birthright citizenship for African province
A French government plan to revoke birthright citizenship in the overseas department of Mayotte has shocked the nation, said Margot Davier in Geo. Mayotte, a tiny island in the Comoros archipelago off Mozambique, opted to become French rather than go independent with the rest of the Comoros colony in 1974, and its people are full citizens. But in recent years it has been struggling with “out-of-control” migration from Comoros. Thousands of impoverished Comorans arrive by boat every year. Complaining that Comoran women come to Mayotte just to give birth, furious locals have been protesting for years, leading the French government to impose creeping restrictions on naturalization. Now, after another eruption of unrest, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has unveiled a radical plan to abolish the droit du sol, the right to citizenship for being born on French soil, in Mayotte. Currently, all babies born in France to foreign parents may become citizens at age 18 if they’ve lived here for five years. Excluding babies born in Mayotte would “amend the principle of an indivisible Republic.”
Mayotte is becoming “the ideological laboratory of the French far right,” said Corentin Lesueur and Nathalie Guibert in
Le Monde. For years, Marine Le Pen and her xenophobic National Rally party have been pushing to end birthright citizenship in France’s Caribbean and African territories—an idea the government of President Emmanuel Macron denounced as racist. Yet now, desperate to defeat the far right in this June’s European Parliament elections, Macron has begun adopting some of Le Pen’s platform in hopes of siphoning off her voters. His government passed a harsh immigration law in December making it easier to deport longtime residents, and now it has its sights on citizenship rights enshrined in the civil code since 1889. The Left has reacted to the proposal with predictable “cries of horror” about the need for “compassion toward African migrants,” said Aurélien Marq in Causeur. But where’s the sympathy for “our compatriots in Mayotte”? Mass migration is turning it into a slum, dotting the island with choleraridden tent cities. Abolishing the droit du sol is “a commonsense measure we should have implemented long ago.”
Yet it won’t make a dent in migration, said Patrick Le Hyaric in L’Humanité, because anchor babies are not the cause. The Macron government has already made it harder for the babies born to foreign parents in Mayotte to become citizens, such as by requiring longer stays before birth, and new registrations of citizenship have indeed plummeted, from 2,900 in 2018 to just 900 in 2022. Yet the decline “had no effect on migratory flows.” Mayotte may be the poorest corner of France, but its average income of $3,500 a year is more than double that in Comoros. Comorans come to seek a better life, not to have French babies. Frankly, we should not deter childbirth anywhere in France, said Claire Rodier in Alternatives Economiques. This country has more retirees than toddlers and desperately needs to boost the birth rate. Indeed, Macron has been begging women to have more children. Apparently, though, “some babies are less welcome than others.”