Immigration to France

France received immigrants in successive waves during the 19th and 20th centuries. They were sometimes rapidly assimilated into French culture when European successive post-war governments wanted to promote immigration and so promoted the notion of France as an "inclusive" nation with "universal" values. Of the total of 229,000 new foreigners coming to France in 2012, nearly 8% were Portuguese, British 5%, Spanish 5%, Italians 4%, Germans 4%, Romanians 3%, and 3% Belgians.

In 2008, the French national institute of statistics INSEE, which has a more restrictive definition of immigration than Eurostat, estimated that 5.3 million foreign-born immigrants and 6.5 million direct descendants of immigrants (born in France with at least one immigrant parent) lived in France representing a total of 11.8 million and 19% of the total population in metropolitan France (62.1 million in 2008). Among them, about 5.5 million are of European origin, 4 million of Maghrebi (either Arab-Berber) origin, 1 million of Sub-saharan African origin and 400,000 of Turkish origin.

The region with the largest proportion of immigrants is the Île-de-France (Greater Paris), where 40% of immigrants live. Other regions with important immigrant populations are Rhône-Alpes (Lyon) and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (Marseille).

Among the 802,000 newborns in metropolitan France in 2010, 27.3% had one or both parents foreign-born, and about one quarter (23.9%) had one parent or both born outside of Europe. Including grandparents, about 40% of newborns in France between 2006 and 2008 had at least one foreign-born grandparent (11% born in another European country, 16% born in Maghreb but some have European ancestry and 12% born in another region of the world).

Successive waves of immigrants during the 19th and 20th centuries were rapidly assimilated into French culture. France's population dynamics began to change in the middle of the 19th century, as France joined the Industrial Revolution. The pace of industrial growth attracted millions of European immigrants over the next century, with especially large numbers arriving from Poland, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. In the wake of the First World War, in which France suffered six million casualties, significant numbers of workers from French colonies came. By 1930, the Paris region alone had a North African Muslim population of 70,000.

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