French conservatives have warned that the small French overseas territory of Mayotte, now overrun with illegal migrants, will be the future of metropolitan France.
Mayotte is a small island in the Indian Ocean and one of France’s overseas departments. It is also the country’s only department where foreigners, most of them illegal immigrants and from the neighboring islands of the Union of the Comoros, with which it forms the Comoro archipelago, make up half of the population.
Thanks to the successive governments in Paris clinging to their cherished principle of jus soli (birthright citizenship), which makes any child born of an illegal immigrant on French territory automatically entitled to a French passport when he or she comes of age, Mayotte can also boast France’s highest birth rate, with a record 10,700 live births for some 310,000 inhabitants in 2022, and its capital’s birth rate is said to be France’s highest in terms of the number of children born in relation to the population.
And all this is still happening although, for Mayotte only and since 2018, for a child to be entitled to French citizenship, one of the two parents has to have been staying legally on French territory for at least three months before the birth.
If France had the same proportion of live births all over its territories, this would translate into over 2.3 million births each year, whereas the actual number for 2022 is around 720,000.