In the 1850’s, there were already people named Honicker in the town of Saint Clair, PA. I imagine I’m descended from them because Saint Clair is my father’s hometown. Honicker is an unusual family name, but the majority of people who bear it reside in Pennsylvania. In the middle of the 19th century, the original Honickers got on a boat and sailed from Germany to find work in the mines.
They came at a good time. A federal Immigration Bureau for processing and regulating immigration was not established until 1891, and only in 1917 was a literacy requirement put in place. The first truly restrictive immigration law targeting Europeans was not enacted until 1921, the Emergency Quota Act. Its main purpose was to keep people from Eastern and Southern Europe out.
In the 19th century, immigrants from outside Europe, along with Native Americans, did not fare well. Already in 1803, in response to the Haitian Revolution, led by slaves who freed themselves and chased out the French, Congress banned immigration of free Blacks to the United States. They feared their presence would disrupt a flourishing slave trade.
In 1830, under President Jackson, the Indian Removal Act was passed. The US government confiscated the lands of Native Americans and forced their removal to west of the Mississippi. Considered as “nations,” they were not granted US citizenship. Not until 1924 and the passage of the American Citizenship Act, did Native Americans gain the 14th Amendment right of automatic citizenship.
On June 2, 1924 Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act
Conflict over immigration, foreigners, and new immigration laws are a constant of US history almost from the start. In 1790, Congress voted to limit naturalization to “free white men.” In 1882, the Chinese became the first group subjected to restrictive laws. With Executive Order 9066, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1942, authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps on the West Coast.
In 1965 the Immigration and Nationality Act established what remain the principles of American immigration law today: family reunification, the need for workers, and asylum for refugees. This law also put in place the first cap on immigration from the Americas.
The French Republic began regulating immigration and defining citizenship at about the same time as the US. At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, any man, regardless of his country of birth, was a citizen if he adhered to the principles of the Revolution. During the 1790’s, a time of war, the French favored naturalization by birth, but by 1804, Napoleon’s Civil Code based nationality on blood: a French child is born to a French father. However, the Code allowed a child born in France of foreign parents to request French nationality once of legal age.
As in the United States, immigration laws began to proliferate in the 1850’s with the industrialization of France, but not until 1889 was there a law to define French nationality and the criteria for naturalization: anyone born in France, once of legal age, was French. Until 1993, if we exclude Vichy France (1940-1944), this was the case. In that year, a new law was enacted requiring children born in France of foreign parents to declare their desire to become French before their 21st birthday. In 1998, this law was abrogated as contrary to the principles of the French Republic.
Since the late 19th century, much like in the United States, France has periodically opened wide its gates to immigration, especially when in dire need of workers, and just as often violently pulled them shut. As France industrialized rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants arrived from Belgium, Spain, Eastern Europe and Italy.
Between the two World Wars, France “imported” workers from its colonies in North Africa and French Indochina, today’s Viet Nam. Even after France’s war with Algeria ended in 1962, France continued to recruit workers from its former colony.
In 1931 France medical students go on strike, protesting the invasion of foreigners. They call them "métèques," a pejorative term for aliens.
In 1981, socialist President François Mitterrand initiated a massive regularization of undocumented immigrants. In 1983, the far-right, anti-immigration party Front National, today known as National Rally, began its rise. In 1990, socialist prime minister Michel Rocard proclaimed, “we cannot take in all the world’s misery. France must remain a land of asylum, but nothing more.”
In our current decade, in the 2022 French presidential elections, National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen, running on a decidedly anti-immigration platform, won 41,5% of the vote. In 2017, running against Macron, she received 21,3%.
On December 19, 2023, the French Senate and Parliament voted into law a bill putting in place new and stricter laws on immigration. Critics argue President Macron’s right-of-center government has simply pushed through the National Rally anti-immigration program. Without its members in Parliament, the law would have never passed.
In a communiqué on its site, the French Senate claims the goals of the law are to 1) facilitate integration into French society; 2) make it easier to expulse foreigners who represent a serious danger for society; 3) improve border control; 4) ensure an overhaul of the asylum system; 5) simplify litigation concerning the entry, stay or expulsion of foreigners.
Those are the broad lines of the new law. In practice it has called into question one of the foundations of the French Republic: the right to equality and freedom from discrimination for all legal residents of France. The new law has created a two-tiered system where legal immigrants have fewer rights and protections than French citizens. It has also done away with, as was the case in 1993, naturalization by birth, and made it much more difficult to obtain the status of asylum seeker.
The new law has been submitted to the Constitutional Council, which will soon announce whether it is conform to the French Constitution. Many argue it is not.
At least 149 immigrants died trying to cross the US southern border in 2023. The southern border of France is the Mediterranean Sea, where last year, an estimated 2,500 died in drownings. Already in 2024, a mother and her two children drowned in the Rio Grande, allegedly because Texan authorities prevented US border agents from helping them.
On February 26, 2023, at least 70 refugees died when their boat sank off the coast of Crotone, in the Calabria region of Italy. These are the remains of the boat, washed up on the shore.
For the United States and France, immigration is a long story. It is probably part of your story as well. At one time our immigrant ancestors may have been considered the “the vermin poisoning the blood” of “real” Americans.
