11/2/09 French immigration expert to discuss issues surrounding French citizenship

Patrick Weil

• Patrick Weil, a leading French expert on immigration law in France, will present a lectured titled “How to be French: Old and New Challenges around French Citizenship,” on Tuesday, Nov. 17 in Rudder 404 beginning at 4:30 pm.
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• Weil examines what it means to be French regardless of one’s country of origin or ancestry.
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• He believes there is a legal dimension to the issue of immigration and citizenship that tells why some citizens still feel like foreigners in France.
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• His 1997 report on immigration and nationality policy reform served as the basis for the immigration and nationality laws passed at the French Parliament in 1998.
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French immigration expert to discuss issues surrounding French citizenship

Patrick Weil, a leading French expert on immigration law in France, will present a lectured titled “How to be French: Old and New Challenges Around French Citizenship,” on Tuesday, Nov. 17 in Rudder 404 beginning at 4:30 pm.

Weil will explore what it means to be French regardless of one’s country of origin or ancestry. The past 25 years have witnessed the development of a heated political debate that has divided the French on the question of nationality and what it means to consider oneself “francais.”

He believes the history of the legal dimension of this issue clarifies a central element of this debate that is linked to past forms of discrimination and explains why it possible to understand how some French people--citizens according to French law--still feel like foreigners in their own country.

Weil is senior research fellow at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) and serves as the director of CEPIC (Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration and Citizenship Policies) at the University of Paris 1-Sorbonne. He has studied and published on Comparative Immigration, Citizenship and Integration Policies. His most recent books are How to be French: The Making of a Nationality Since 1789, Duke University Press, 2008 (translation by Cathy Porter); La Republique et sa diversite (The Republic and its Diversity), Paris, Seuil, 2005; and in co. ed. with Stephane Dufoix, L’esclavage, la colonisation et apres... France, Etats-Unis, Royaume-Uni (Slavery, Colonization and After...France, USA, UK), Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2005.

In 1997, he was appointed by the French government to write a report on immigration and nationality policy reform. This report served as the basis for the immigration and nationality laws passed at the French Parliament in 1998. In 2003, he served as a member of President Jacques Chirac’s Presidential Commission on the ‘Implementation of the principle of Secularism within the French Republic’. Since 2005, he has served as a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Weil holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and an MBA from the ESSEC Business School. He received a B.A. in public law from the University of Paris1, Panthéon–Sorbonne.

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10/30/09