France: Muslim Population Flexing its Muscles

Like the U.K., France is one of the EU's biggest melting pots. The largest waves of immigrants in France originated from neighboring Italy, Portugal and Spain as well as its former colonies, including Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Like Britain, France shares a long history with Muslims and other cultures for which French has also been the mother tongue. It has also traditionally considered itself a country of immigration, and about 6.3 percent of the country's 58 million population are immigrants. In recent decades, the inward migration trend has shifted from its direct neighbors in Europe to those of Northern Africa and Turkey, significantly increasing France's Muslim population and making it easily the largest in Europe with 5 million. France has a tradition of welcoming immigrants, but the public also expects newcomers to assimilate into the customs and traditions of French society. Accordingly, France does not "recognize differences in culture or religion in the public sphere" as a recent Council of Europe report poignantly stated. The challenges that strategy poses became apparent in recent years with the painful national debate over the hijab, or Muslim headscarf. This September, headscarves, Jewish skullcaps, Sikh turbans and any other "overt religious symbols," including large Christian crosses, will be verboten in schools in the strictly secular nation. Foreigners in France face a number of discriminatory hurdles. Chief among them is their exclusion from almost 6 million jobs that non-EU immigrants are banned from holding, including civil service jobs (including the country's postal service and railways), management positions in the entertainment industry or French newspapers and magazines, many stock market-related jobs and an array of others. On the other hand, immigrants can apply for naturalized citizenship after five years, and children born in France to immigrant parents may apply when they are 18 , provided they have lived there for at least five years. The country also launched a Green Card program in 1998 aimed at drawing highly qualified workers to fill vacant hi-tech jobs.

After the 9/11 attacks, the country's anti-discrimination hotline recorded an upsurge in xenophobic attitudes towards Muslims. And beginning in April 2002, a wave of vandalism and attacks were carried out at Muslim mosques and prayer places. Open Society researchers have cast some of the blame on the media for inciting "muslimaphobia." The media, it reported in 2002, aids the trend of associating "Islam with immigration, criminality, fanaticism and terrorism, thereby providing a justification for exclusion and religiously motivated discrimination."