A radical announcement intended to put an end to an explosive social and security situation.
Traveling to Mayotte this Sunday, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced the end of land law on the 101st French department, which is facing a serious migration crisis.
“We are going to take a radical decision, which is the inclusion of the end of land law in Mayotte in a constitutional revision that the President of the Republic will choose,” declared the tenant of Beauvau, praising an “extremely strong, clear” measure. , radical”.
What are the issues related to the application of this measure?
Le Parisien takes stock.
What is land law and blood law?
There are several possibilities to become French.
Blood law, based on filiation, stipulates that a child born to at least one French parent inherits his nationality from birth.
It is usually opposed to land law.
As its name suggests, the latter allows an individual to obtain French nationality due to a birth having taken place in France, even when the parents are not French.
This land law comes in two parts, as the vie-publique site points out.
The first concerns people born in France to two foreign parents.
Upon reaching the age of majority, a child can be granted French nationality.
“For this, he must reside in France when he turns 18 and have his habitual residence in France for a continuous or discontinuous period of at least five years since the age of 11,” specifies the site.
The second part concerns the “double soil law”, which allows children born in France, with at least one parent also born in France, to obtain French nationality from birth.
The Ministry of the Interior recalls that this provision was born in 1851 for “essentially military reasons”.
In other words, in order to be able to incorporate more soldiers into the French army.
Why is the department of Mayotte already an exception?
The overseas department has particularities, “notably geographical, since Mayotte is halfway between Madagascar and Africa”, indicates Vincent Brengarth, lawyer at the Paris bar.
The importance of migratory flows has thus “contributed to a greater presence of people of foreign nationality, and this in an overall context of high precariousness”.
In Mayotte, land law had already been tightened for this reason as part of the Asylum and Immigration law in 2018. Since this date, in order for a child born on the island to become French, one of his parents have, on the day of birth, been regularly present in France for at least three months.
A unique case in France, since no residency period is required elsewhere in the country.
The Constitutional Council then considered that the laws “may be subject to adaptations due to particular characteristics and constraints”.
What does the measure to abolish land rights consist of?
Concretely, if the abolition of land rights is enacted in Mayotte, “it will no longer be possible to become French if you are not yourself the child of French parents”, explained Gérald Darmanin, assuring that this “will literally cut the "attractiveness" that the Mahorais archipelago can have, faced with strong migratory pressure from the neighboring Comoros.
“The announcement made by Gérald Darmanin would therefore amount to making the conditions of access to French nationality in Mayotte even more derogatory, because they would not simply consist of hardening the land law but of neutralizing it,” underlines Me Vincent Brengarth .
Such a deletion would thus constitute a “clear difference with the rest of the territory”, he continues.
The minister specified that the abolition of land rights in Mayotte, as well as the tightening of family reunification permitted by the Immigration law passed in December, will make it possible to “put an end to the territorialized visa”, a system preventing holders of a residence permit from Mahorese stay to come to France.
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Its removal is one of the main demands of the groups of angry residents who have paralyzed the island since last month.
“Since we will have many fewer residence permits and we will no longer have the possibility of being French when we come to Mayotte, territorialized visas are no longer necessary,” assured the minister.
According to Gérald Darmanin, the removal of this system must be recorded in a Mayotte bill - announced long ago and confirmed on January 30 by the new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal - which will be tabled in the National Assembly "in the coming weeks ".