Recent immigration trends in France and elements for a comparison with the United Kingdom

Population

Volumn 59, Issue 5, 2004, Pages 635-672

  Thierry, Xavier ^a  

^a INSTITUT NATIONAL D'ÉTUDES DÉMOGRAPHIQUES   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEMOGRAPHIC TREND; IMMIGRANT POPULATION; IMMIGRATION; INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION; LABOR MIGRATION; NATURALIZATION; POPULATION MIGRATION;

EURASIA; EUROPE; FRANCE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 33750600633     PISSN: 16342941     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3654920     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. The European Economic Area comprises the EU member states (15 countries up to the enlargement of 2004), plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. The term "third country" refers to all other countries.
2. For more details, see Thierry X., 2000, "Les entrées d'étrangers en France: évolutions statistiques et bilan de l'opération de regularisation exceptionnelle de 1997", Population, 55(3), p. 577.
3. Thierry X., 2000, op. cit.;
4. Thierry X., 200 1, "Les entrées d'étrangers en France de 1994 à 1999", Population, 56(3), pp. 423-50.
5. Using statistics specially produced for this article, at our request, by Julie Jefferies of the Office of National Statistics.
6. For more details, cf. G. Neyret, X. Thierry, M. Tribalat, 1998, Rapport final de la mission statistique sur les ressortissants étrangers au minisère de l'Intérieur, official report.
7. More recently, see also: X. Thierry, 2004, "L'utilisation des micro-données relatives à la délivrance des titres de séjour, un changement de cap?", paper to the AIDELF conference, Budapest, forthcoming, available at: http://www.aidelf.org
8. United Nations, 1998 Recommedations relative to internationl migration statistics, 89 p.
9. For more detail, see: Ministry of the Interior, 2003 Les titres de séjour des étrangers en France en 2002. Report to Parliament:
10. Theirry X., 2001, of cit., appedix "Comment procéder à l'identifaction des premiers titres de séjour dans AGDREF?", p 448-9.
11. These are admissions for residence of one year or longer, including students. For want of a better indicator, measurement of the length of stay is based on the period of validity shown on the residence permits. This period of validity varies depending on nationality and the grounds for admission. At the time of their admission, one-third of nationals from EU countries hold a residence permit of only one year (renewable), whereas this is the case for three-quarters of third-country nationals; students only hold one-year permits. These differences reflect the legislation on residence permit issue and give no indication of the length of stay intended by the individuals. The argument that the residence permits issued to students correspond to stays often shorter than the validity of the permit is not supported by UK data which reveal that students' intentions about length of stay are very similar to those of people entering for employment purposes.
12. The regulatory framework for the special regularization programme of 1997-1998 was defined by the so-called Chevènement circular (circulaire INT/D, 97-104C, published in the Journal official of 26 June 1997).
13. The same is true for the number of first asylum applications registered by the OFPRA, including children under 18 (numbers partially estimated), which went from 33,548 in 1999 to 43,322 in 2000 and 54,291 in 2001, equivalent to an average of around 44,000 a year for the period 1999-2001. A new estimate made by INED (using the AGDREF source), intended to avoid the duplication arising from the existence of two institutions authorized to receive requests for protection - the OFPRA counts requests for conventional asylum, the Ministry of the Interior counts requests for territorial asylum, but in reality the same individual can apply to one and then the other - puts the total number of asylum applications (conventional of territorial) at an average of 50,000 a year in the period 1999-2001. In 2002, 58,987 asylum application claims were enumerated by the OFPRA (including minors), while the Ministry of the Interior totalled 28,372 applications for territorial asylum. Our estimate excluding duplication suggests that this total number of claims (87,359) corresponds to only 74,000 first asylum applications.
14. In addition to the results for France from the Geographical Mobility and Social Integration survey (see M. Tribalat, "Enquête Mobilité géographique et insertion sociale (MGIS) de 1992: rapport final", 555 p.)
15. various studies in other countries have establshed that age at migration during childhood influences education attaintment (cf. S. Cahan et al., 2001, "Age at immigration and scholastic achievement in school-age children: Is there a vulnerable age?", Interational Migration Review, 35 (134), pp 587-95.
16. This information is taken from the passport (customs control stamp) or the visa when one is required; otherwise it si self-reported. It appears on the official document used for making the residence permit. It is seldom missing and on the whole appears consistent with the other dates contained in the files on foreigners. When it is missing or inconsistent we substitute either the date the file was opened or the year in which the very first residence document was issued.
17. Outside of the special programmes that allow for regularizations of foreigners (as was the case in 1997-1998 with the "Chevènement circular"), the law provides automatic mechanisms for regularization. Thus the law of 11 May 1998 (no. 98-349) states that after ten years of illegal residence (article 12bis3) foreigners can have their status regularized. So foreigners who entered in 1994-1995 will be coming forward for a few more years yet. In addition, prefects have discretionary powers to issue residence permits to foreigners not satisfying this condition. These routine regularizations are examined later.
18. These surveys ask for the country of residence in the previous year. Cf. F. Bailly, E-M. Mouhoud, J. Oudinet, 2003, "Union européenne. Les nouvelles dynamiques migratoires: relance et complexification", Chronique internationale de l'IRES, 84, pp. 30-47.
19. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta.
20. In addition to the concise breakdown by nationalities in Appendix Table A3, readers can consult a set of tables by nationality giving details according to sex, age and grounds for admission, on the INED website: http://www.ined.fr/englishversion/population-in-figures/france/
21. A special issue of International Migration (vol. 41, 2003) is devoted to Chinese immigration to Europe.
22. The question asked in the 1999 Study of Family History (EHF) survey ("In which language, dialect, or 'patois' did your parents usually speak to you when you were a child, about five years old?") provides no information about proficiency in French at the time of arrival in France.
23. This component is heavily dependent on what are taken to be Francophone countries. Under a narrow definition that includes only the countries where French is the official language (27), French speakers represented only around 1 in 6 immigrants in 1999-2001, but the proportion rises to 40% if we include nationals of the other member countries of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Both definitions present drawbacks: the first does not include the countries where in fact a sizeable proportion of the population speaks French (the case of the Maghreb countries), while the second includes countries where the number of French speakers is small (countries of former Indo-China). Consequently we chose a delimitation that includes the three Maghreb countries with the 27 countries of the first group.
24. Defined here as immigration by nationals of the Commonwealth countries and the United States.
25. This survey asked the following question: "Did you already know French before coming to France?" This was the case for nearly 90% of men coming from Algeria and Morocco after 1974, which shows the close link between country of origin and knowledge of the language. See Michèle Tribalat, with Patrick Simon and Benoît Riandey, 1996, De l'immigraation à assimilatios, Enquête sur les populations d'origine étrangèe en France, La Découverte/INED, 302 p.
26. The MGIS survey showed the large proportion of multiple motivations, especially after the recruitment of foreign labour was suspended in 1974. For example, for the Turkish migration stream, "the proportion of men reporting coming only for work went from 92% in the period 1970-1974 to 11% at the end of the 1990s" (M. Tribalat, 1996, op. cit.)
27. J.-F. Léger, 2004, "Les entrées d' étrangers sur le marché du travail français (1990 à 2001)", Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 20(1), May-June, pp. 7-31. This study concludes that a total of 102,000 foreigners entered the labour market in 2001.
28. See G. Petek-Salom, 2001, "Des gendres et des brus importés de Turquie par les familles", Hommes & Migrations, 1232, July-August, pp. 41-50.
29. M. Tribalat, 1996, "Chronique de l'immigration", Population, 51 (1), pp. 141-194.
30. M. Tribalat, 2004, "An estimation of the foreign-origin populations of France in 1999", Population-E, 59(1), pp. 49-80.
31. X. Thierry, 2001, "La fréquence de renouvellement des premiers titres de séjour", Population, 56(3), pp. 451-468. The proportion of permits renewed depends both on the behaviour of the foreigners, who may or may not apply for renewal when their first residence permit expires, and on the outcome of the processing of their applications by the authorities.
32. The law of 26 November 2003 (the so-called "Sarkozy Law"), applicable in 2004 modifies the conditions for the issue of long-term residence permits. Henceforth, spouses of for eigners will be systematically granted a one-year permit on arrival, whatever the duration of the spouse's permit, and will have to wait two years before requesting a ten-year permit if the spouse also has such a permit, five years if not, and conditional on the foreigner being sufficiently intergrated into French society. For spouses of French nationals who hold one-year permits when they arrive, the length of marriage before they can request a long-term residence permit is raised to two years.
33. The AGDREF does in fact contain a variable indicating whether the foreigner has entered legally or not, but there is nothing to guarantee the quality of this information recorded by the prefectures; in addition, since it is a variable subject to correction it is unsuitable for use in a retrospective approach of the kind adopted here.
34. This analysis assumes that responses for the date of entry are of good quality. This seems to be the case, at least for third-country nationals. Among the first residence permits of at least one year issued since 1997, 78% of the individuals whose first contact occurred in 1997 reported arriving in 1996-1997, and very few (1.3%) gave a later year of entry.
35. This date is reliable inasmuch as it results from a routine administrative operation (preparing a certificate of residence). The use of this information was first undertaken at INED, with the help of Nicolas Lemétayer.
36. Even if this proportion is smaller than in the general population, i.e. regardless of the time lag (98%). It is nonetheless constant over time; thus there would be no visible variation in the reception policy for foreigners in the prefectures.
37. We verified that the characteristics of the population being studied change little by raising the threshold for the length of illegal residence to two years.
38. Any residence document, whatever its duration, with the exception of documents valid for up to three months while an application is being processed: receipt for residence permit application (récépissé de demande de carte de séjour - RCS), provisional residence permit (autorisation provisoire de séjour - APS), summons for permit (convocation).
39. X. Thierry, 2001, op. cit.
40. There is nonetheless a slight divergence, caused notably by a smaller Chinese contingent (7% as against 11% in the previous study). Half of the Chinese regularized in 1997-1998 were former asylum seekers, that we have difficulty identifying in this new study, probably because asylum seekers usually contact the prefecture shortly after entering France and filing their application with the OFPRA.
41. This right was granted by the law of 11 May 1998.
42. A draft regulation requiring Member States to respect a series of definitions and to supply Eurostat with statistical tables based on these definitions is currently under discussion. To obtain more information on the process of harmonizing statistics on international migration, in 2004 the European Commission asked seven teams - including INED - to produce a diagnosis of the situation in the EU-25 and to contribute to implementing this draft regulation (cf. THESIM: Towards Harmonized European Statistics on International Migration, edited by Michel Poulain, GEDAP).
43. For information on the new methodology of this survey, see ONS, 2 International Migration: Migrants Entering and Leaving the United Kingdom and England and Wales, Series MM no. 28.
44. C. Shaw, 2004, "2002-based national population projections for the UK and constituent countries", Population Trends, Spring 2004, 115, pp. 6-15.
45. ONS, 2003, Review of International Migration Statistics, NSQR series, Report no. 23 (see http://www.statstics.gov.uk/methods_quality/ quality_review/population.asp).
46. For the period 1999-2001, an annual average of 75,000 asylum claims were registered in the UK, a figure that can be compared with our estimate of 50,000 for France (claims for conventional asylum and territorial asylum, minus duplicates, cf. footnote 10 above).
47. This, it can be recalled, is a count of all foreigners arriving as adults who have obtained a first residence document, whatever its length of validity or type; this document may be a simple receipt for the permit application (valid for three months) or even a provisional residence permit (APS) usually issued to asylum seekers (cf. footnote 34 above).
48. It can be recalled that comparison of the IPS results with those from the last census (2001) showed an under estimation of immigration measured using only the IPS (thus justifying the use of complementary sources). Data from the 2001 Census are for the number of people reporting living abroad one year earlier. The total number of immigrants to England and Wales is 370,000 (including British nationals), a figure very close to that supplied by the IPS for 2000 (340,000). But post-censal analyses found high levels of non-response in areas of high immigration and to this question on the census form (despite the use of imputation procedures). Cf. M. Rendall, C. Tomassini, D. Elliot, 2003, "Estimation of Annual International Migration from the Labour Force Survey of the United Kingdom and the Continental European Union", Statistical Journal of the UNECE, volume 20 (3-4), pp. 219-234.
49. These data can be used to describe the structure of the immigration flows (as percentages); the corresponding numbers are not shown so as to avoid contradiction with Table 7. In Table 8, however. the numbers are shown, since there are very few divergences with the adjusted data for European immigration.
50. These surveys, it will be remembered, record the country of residence in the previous year; cf. M. Rendall, C. Tomassini, D. Elliot, 2003, op. cit.
51. Cf. F. Bailly, E. M. Mouhoud, J. Oudinet, 2003, op. cit.
52. By doing the following calculation:40/26 × 43,000, the estimated total number of entries by nationals of EEA countries to France would stand at around 66,000.
53. However, the right of settlement enjoyed by EU nationals may well lead in their case to a better match between the reason for the stay and the grounds for issuing the permit, since they can be open about their reasons for coming without having to worry about or anticipate on the constraints of the regulations.
54. Based on the results of the study by J.-F. Léger, 2004, op. cit.
55. See F. Héran (ed.), 2002, Immigration, marché A travail, integration, Commissariat geénéral du Plan, La Documentation franćaise, 2002, 410 p.
56. For a fuller discussion of this question, cf. "La mobilité des étudiants entre et vets les pays de l'OCDE, une approche comparative", in OCDE, 2001, Tendances des migrations internationales, SOPEMI, pp. 101-126.
57. Cf. Thierry, X., 2003, "L'année d'arrivée en France: apport d'une nouvelle question au recensement de 1999", paper to the Conference des statisticiens européens, UNECE, Geneva (available from the author).