Article: France
Section: Demographics

Question: Why did about 1.6 million "pieds noirs" return to France in the 1960s?

With an estimated population of 66 million people as of July 2013, France is the 21st-most populous country in the world and the third-most populous in Europe.
Although the French people are historically of Celtic, Romantic, and Germanic origin, they are today a mixture of several ethnic groups, due mostly to large-scale immigration over the last century.
In 2004, the Institut Montaigne estimated that within Metropolitan France, 51 million people were white (85% of the population), 6 million were North African (10%), 2 million were black (3.5%), and 1 million were Asian (1.5%).
A law originating from the 1789 revolution and reaffirmed in the 1958 French Constitution makes it illegal for the French state to collect data on ethnicity and ancestry, although some surveys, such as the TeO ("Trajectories and origins") poll conducted jointly by INED and INSEE in 2008, are allowed to do so.
It was estimated that 5 million people were of Italian ancestry (the most numerous immigrant community), between 3 million and 6 million people are of North African ancestry, 2.5 million people are of Sub-Saharan African origin, 200,000 people are of Turkish ancestry, and many more are of other European ethnic ancestry, namely Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Greek.
Indeed, it is currently estimated that 40% of the French population is descended at least partially from the different waves of immigration the country has received since the early 20th century; between 1921 and 1935 alone, about 1.1 million net immigrants came to France.
The next largest waves came in the 1960s, when around 1.6 million "pieds noirs" returned to France following the independence of its North African possessions.
France remains a major destination for immigrants, accepting about 200,000 legal immigrants annually.
It is also Western Europe's leading recipient of asylum seekers, with an estimated 50,000 applications in 2005 (a 15% decrease from 2004).
The European Union allows free movement between the member states, although France established controls to curb Eastern European migration, and immigration remains a contentious political issue.
In 2008, the French national institute of statistics INSEE estimated that the total number of foreign-born immigrants was around 5 million (8% of the population), while their French-born descendants numbered 6.5 million, or 11% of the population.
Thus, nearly a fifth of the country's population were either first or second-generation immigrants, more than 5 million of European origin and 4 million of Maghrebi origin.
In 2008, France granted citizenship to 137,000 persons, mostly to people from Morocco, Algeria and Turkey.
France is an outlier among developed countries in general, and European countries in particular, in having a fairly high rate of natural population growth: by birth rates alone, France was responsible for almost all natural population growth in the European Union in 2006, with the natural growth rate (excess of births over deaths) rising to 300,000.
This was the highest rate since the end of the baby boom in 1973, and coincides with the rise of the total fertility rate from a nadir of 1.7 in 1994 to 2.0 in 2010.
From 2006 to 2011 population growth was on average +0.6% per year.
Immigrants are also major contributors to this trend; in 2010, 27% of newborns in metropolitan France had at least one foreign-born parent and 24% had at least one parent born outside of Europe (parents born in overseas territories are considered as born in France).
France is a highly-urbanized country, with its largest cities (in terms of metropolitan area population) being Paris (11,836,970), Lyon (1,757,180), Marseille (1,618,369), Lille (1,163,934), Toulouse (1,118,472), Bordeaux (1,009,313), Nice (999,678), Nantes (768,305).
A perennial political issue concerns rural flight.