Vicious Circles: Immigration and National Identity in Twentieth-Century France
1995; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1/2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3685089
ISSN1527-2095
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Social Issues
ResumoIN AUGUST 1993, THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT'S Journal Officiel published the terms of newly-adopted legislation designed, according to Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, to stem the tide of would-be immigrants threatening to overwhelm France's political, cultural and social institutions. Impelled by ambitions to see the country achieve a state of policy nirvana he called Zero Immigration,' between May and August 1993, Pasqua ushered into existence a cluster of laws designed to curb the entry of foreigners at the borders and to assert greater control over the conditions of their legal residence in France.2 Described by Le Monde's Philippe Bernard as a very severe toughening3 of policies with respect to foreigners, the Pasqua legislation crowned a twenty-year effort by the French state to halt the influx of immigrants-particularly workers from North Africa and other former colonies whose labor had fueled the postwar industrial expansion that began to slow in the early 1970s. Pasqua's sweeping policy initiative, like its more piecemeal antecedents of the preceding decade,4 places French society at considerable odds with its venerable post-revolutionary tradition of welcoming foreigners in need. Born of a commitment to universalist principles of inalienable human rights, modern France's open-door policy of granting refuge to persecuted individuals and minorities-singularly generous by European standards-is being sorely tested in the postcolonial era, in which former imperial subjects and their progeny have fled the grinding poverty of economies left underdeveloped by a century or more of colonial exploitation.
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