Language Tests, Binationality and Franco-Algerian Tensions
This week in French immigration news. Part 7.
I’ll admit it. I hacked the system. In July 2023, when I sent in my application for French citizenship, I didn’t include a certificate proving my French language abilities.
It’s not because I couldn’t pass the test, but because I felt I had sufficiently proven my linguistic capacities through higher-level studies in French (and not of French). I wrote to Sciences Po, where I had completed a master’s degree in journalism and international affairs, including several classes in French, and requested a letter attesting to my French skills. The letter worked.
Many people who apply for French nationality don’t have this privilege — the weight of an elite institution shifting behind their application. Which brings me to the first of my weekly French immigration news updates…
France to make language rules stricter
The new rules are set to go through in July 2025, a late byproduct of the December 2023 immigration law, passed by then Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. French residents requesting nationality or long-term visas will now need to prove their French level in order to get their papers. Middle school-level for a short-stay visa (two to four years). High school-level for a long-stay visa (10 years). University-level for French nationality.
It might not seem like a lot to ask, but for working-class folks like Marianne, who has been in France for more than a decade and works as a maid, proving a high-school level of French while providing for a family is not easy. Marianne was interviewed by France 24 as she prepares her language test in the southern French city of Marseille.
She is one of an estimated 20,000 immigrants currently living legally in France who could be deported if unable to prove their French levels in advance of their next visa appointment. Another 40,000 might have new claims rejected.
Clearly unable to recognize that not all French residents are white and privileged, the French Interior Minister has downplayed the new measures, saying: “When a legally resident foreigner has not mastered French for several years, it's because he or she has not made the effort to learn the language.”
This is patently untrue. Ultimately, the issue of language comes down to resources, not effort. (Also, for what it’s worth, I’ve known many American residents in France who have somehow not learned the language despite living here for decades, and they seem to be doing just fine.) For France’s poorest residents, who are disproportionately immigrants or of an immigration background, not only are French classes time-consuming, but they are also expensive: the tests alone cost an additional 90 to 150 euros.
To French-Congolese journalist Douce Dibongo, who wrote an op-ed for Mediapart, ultimately, the restrictions on French level are nothing more than neo-colonial racism: “By tightening access to residency through the French language, the government is acting as a worthy heir to its colonial history,” she writes.
Binationals make their voices heard
I previously reported on the attacks against binationals by baby-faced fascist firebrand Jordan Bardella, last summer. At the time, Bardella, who was campaigning in snap elections, suggested that binationals couldn’t be trusted to hold sensitive government positions because of the fear of foreign interference.
This morning, a collective of binationals, including the director of the Paris Grande Mosquée, France’s Minister Delegate for Seniors and People with Disabilities of France and the Counselor of the French Minister of Health for Research and Medical Education, responded to the growing attacks against dual-citizens in an op-ed for the French newspaper Le Monde.
In the open letter, the authors highlight the immense value that binationals have brought France, in terms of economic, social and cultural exchange.
Unfortunately, they’re fighting against strong winds. A key element of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s political project is the casting of doubt on the commitment of binationals to France. How can you faithfully serve two countries?
The collective’s response is quite powerful:
“To those who persist in asking “Who are you?” we reply: “We are the sons and daughters of a traveling wind, sown in the four corners of a land called France, where our roots have dug memory and our flowers dream of the dawn of tomorrow. We are the dust of caravans, the cry of ancestors, and also the glow of the tricolor, the builders of a future that will not be torn from us. We are ourselves. And we will remain so.”
France to transmit a list of Algerians for deportation
As tensions simmer in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere around the world, so too have Franco-Algerian ones. The crux of the issue? Algeria’s unwillingness to take in Algerian nationals who have a deportation notice, including the perpetrator of a recent deadly attack in the city of Mulhouse, and France’s recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara (which Algeria doesn’t recognize).
I won’t get into the complicated back-and-forths of the latest saga — which to be honest, I only understand in very broad terms — but to say that while the French government, and its increasingly far-right Interior Minister, will most certainly pat itself on the back for the latest news of a possible agreement on deportations, the end result is the same: more deportations, more xenophobic rhetoric, and no more security for everyday French residents.
My daughter, with a Masters II from Paris Diderot, 7 years legal residency and fully employed in her field, applied in March 2023 and hasn’t heard a thing except that the dossier was received.