The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, confirmed on Friday April 24 the holding of a “long-term” operation in Mayotte. Large numbers of police and gendarmes are mobilized to act against arms trafficking, crime and delinquency, by destroying slums and mass expulsions of illegal immigrants.
Populated by nearly 350,000 to 400,000 inhabitants, the archipelago saw its population quadruple between 1985 and 2017, according to INSEE, under the combined effect of a high birth rate and migratory phenomena. Mayotte now has 50% foreigners, mostly from neighboring Comoros, but a third of them were born on the island.
To understand the migratory tensions in Mayotte, let’s broaden the focus: Mayotte historically belongs to an archipelago made up of three other islands: Anjouan (located less than 70 kilometers away), Moheli at 130 kilometers and Grande Comore at 190 kilometers. The progressive fragmentation of this area located in eastern Africa largely explains the current difficulties.
First a French colony, the islands forming the Comoros archipelago constitute a single overseas territory attached to France from 1946 to 1975. Their links are old: families are scattered on the four islands, unions across the archipelago are frequent, cultural and commercial exchanges, multiple.
The year 1974 marked a turning point: the archipelago wishing to gain independence, a self-determination consultation was organized there. Residents of Anjouan, Moheli, and Grande Comore speak out for independence; only Mayotte votes for the maintenance within the French Republic. France, which wishes to maintain its strategic presence in the Indian Ocean, decides to take these results into account separately. And this, despite international law: a few days before the election, the United Nations asked France to respect the unity and territorial integrity of the archipelago. “This event is a legal coup,” said Claude-Valentin Marie, overseas expert at the National Institute for Demographic Studies.
While Mayotte obtains a hybrid and provisional status of “territorial collectivity”, in 1976, the nascent Comorian state, composed of the three other islands, contests this French sovereignty and obtains on several occasions the support of the General Assembly of the United Nations and of the African Union. From there, the Mahoran elites are worried about a possible return to the Comorian whole and are increasingly demanding the status of an overseas department for Mayotte.
After the independence referendum, relations and population flows between the islands, starting with Mayotte and Anjouan, became more complex. Mayotte is gaining in attractiveness, while political instability is damaging the rest of the Comoros. Between 1975 and 1997, the population of Mayotte rose, according to INSEE, from 45,000 to 131,000 people.
“If we simplify, the more the Comorian cousins ??arrive, the more the Mahorais ask for institutional protections from the French authorities”, summarizes the demographer Claude-Valentin Marie. In this context, in 1995, the French government set up a visa procedure, non-existent until then, for Comorians wishing to travel to the island of Mayotte. Obtaining this “Balladur visa” being difficult, the crossings, which had been usual until then, began to be done clandestinely.
“The tightening of migration policies is creating increasingly difficult crossing conditions and causing a large number of deaths at sea which remain very poorly documented, confirms sociologist Nina Sahraoui, who conducted a field survey on pregnant women in Mayotte. . In addition, these policies produce immobilization: people who would most likely travel back and forth, especially to visit dispersed families, find themselves trapped because of their irregularity. »
After the vote of the Mahorais in 2009, the old demand for departmentalization is finally satisfied. On March 31, 2011, Mayotte became the 101st French department, and the 5th French overseas. But this new status brings Mayotte into a period of great social tension: expectations in terms of economic development and improved social rights being very high, the population is disappointed. Many indicators continue to be red in this new department, from the highest youth unemployment rate to the highest illiteracy rate in France.
The consequences are twofold. On the island, migratory flows from nearby islands continue, and the resentment of the Mahorais towards their Comorian neighbors is accentuated. At the same time, departures from Mayotte are increasing. As underlined by the research of Antoine Math, an economist at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, the island is becoming a land of emigration. It is above all young people who leave the island, first to Reunion and, to a lesser extent, to mainland France.
Over the years, the political response took the form of a tightening of access to French nationality on Mayotte soil. While the provisions are gradually accumulating, 2018 represents a major change of course: the French nationality code is reviewed as part of the “law for controlled immigration”, and the jus soli is specifically restricted there for children born in Mayotte from foreign parents. In order for them to benefit from jus soli and to gain French nationality under the same conditions as in the rest of French territory, parents must now prove a legal stay of three months before the birth of the child.
“This is a major break in the nationality code. It is all the more important to understand it as it has a political consequence,” insists Claude-Valentin Marie. In August 2022, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, had detailed in the Sunday newspaper, his project for a new hardening of the law of the soil, consisting in conditioning the French nationality of a child to a legal stay of at least a year in Mayotte, and no longer three months, for at least one of the two parents. Questioned by Le Figaro on April 24, 2023, he clarified that he was working “under the authority of the Prime Minister on provisions specific to Mayotte and on which she will communicate when the time comes”.