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FRENCH CITIZENSHIP ROW ENGULFS INDIAN OCEAN ISLAND OF MAYOTTE

Published
15 February

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Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Residents on Mayotte have been setting up roadblocks to protest against living
conditions and insecurity
By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, París


A speck of France in the Indian Ocean has become the latest battleground over
the laws on immigration.

A French possession since 1841, the tiny island of Mayotte is now a département
or county of the Republic which means, in theory, that the same rules apply
there as in the Moselle or Maine-et-Loire, or anywhere else in France.

But the territory's difficult experience of mass immigration is pushing
President Emmanuel Macron's government to abandon the sacrosanct French
principle of equality for all.

Visiting the island at the weekend, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced
that the automatic right to French citizenship by virtue of birth on the island
is to be rescinded.

A constitutional change to this effect is now to be pursued by the government.
Crucially the end of "birthplace citizenship" would apply only to the island of
Mayotte - not to France as a whole.

But therein lies the rub. For different reasons, both the left and right of
French politics see the reform as problematic.



The left says it is a breach of the Republican principle of universality, and
opens the door to a citizenship based on racial origin.

The right says that changing the rules for Mayotte are fair enough, but it is in
France as a whole that "birthplace citizenship" needs to be abandoned.

The droit du sol - right of the soil, also known as jus soli - is the legal
notion that a person born on the territory of a nation automatically becomes a
citizen of that nation. Its opposing idea is jus sanguinis - right of blood
which confers citizenship only on the children of citizens.

For many, particularly on the left, the droit du sol is an important marker,
confirming France's status as a beacon of humanist values.

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
The French Air and Border Police have been carrying out operations to intercept
migrants from the Comoros islands

In fact, strictly speaking, the droit du sol is not an automatic right in
France, as it is for example in the US where a birth certificate is enough to
get a passport. A child born in France to foreign parents needs to apply for
citizenship in his or her teens, and then prove continuous presence.

However, the point still stands. Birth on the territory opens the way to
membership of the nation.



But events in Mayotte show how in modern times pressures of demographic change
and mass migration are leading governments to question what had until recently
been matters of consensus.

Mayotte is currently prey to a wave of civil disobedience born of local fear of
being overwhelmed by outsiders.

Lying 70km (43.5 miles) from one of the poorest countries in Africa - the
Comoros islands - Mayotte has a "small boat" problem that makes the UK's, over
the Channel from France, seem puny by comparison.

Hundreds of people arrive every week in boats from the Comoros, in addition to
whom there are now increasing numbers of asylum seekers from the Great Lakes
region of Central Africa.

In the island's hospitals more than 10,000 babies are being born every year -
the majority to mothers from the Comoros. Mayotte's overall population is
estimated at 300,000 - but only half of them bear French passports.

Since mid-January "citizens' committees" have set up roadblocks around the
island, demanding a crackdown on immigration and the crime they say comes with
it. From all political shades in Mayotte comes the same cry: end the droit du
sol.



"If not, we will be perpetually the prisoners of our geography," says Estelle
Youssouffa, a Mayotte MP from the independent LIOT bloc in the National
Assembly.

"We will end up welcoming all the misery of the Comoros and of Africa - all so
that people in Paris can parade their grand principles."

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Gérald Darmanin, the French minister of the interior and overseas territories,
says abolishing the droit du sol would make Mayotte less appealing to migrants

"The right to security is also a fundamental right," argues Ms Youssouffa. "The
right to move around freely is a fundamental right. But we are deprived of these
rights - because the violence is now so bad we can no longer live normally."

The French interior minister says he is responding to the appeals of the
Mahorais, as the people of Mayotte are known. He says that once the droit du sol
has been abolished on the island, the lure will disappear.

Currently most demands for regularisation are from the Comoran families of
babies who are born on Mayotte and therefore French. When the babies are no
longer French, the argument goes, the people will stop coming.

No-one knows if that is true or not.

For the left, it is not citizenship per se that draws immigrants to Mayotte, but
the comparatively wealthier standard of living. And they warn that, for all the
government's promises to the contrary, what happens first in Mayotte could all
too easily be followed in France as a whole.

No-one knows if that is true either.

What is undeniable is that both the mainstream and hard right in French politics
are now talking openly about ending the droit du sol in France proper as well.

For them it is exactly the kind of shock measure that the immigration crisis
requires, as asylum requests reached a record 142,500 last year.

The Macron government needs the political right to get through any
constitutional change on Mayotte. Might they make their support conditional on
the reform being broadened to France as a whole?

Or might they contrive to block the constitutional change on the basis that for
Mayotte alone it is too restrictive? And then at the next presidential elections
ride - they hope - to power, promising a nationwide end to the droit du sol?

The world is changing. It is possible.


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