Did you hear that the French government has forbidden citizenship to a woman who has lived in the country for years, and raised her kids there, all because they didn’t like the way she dressed!

Most of us would be outraged if dress code became a reason to deny a migrant the benefits of citizenship. If, say, a Fijian was prohibited from becoming American or British or Australian because he wore the same clothes he dressed in as a resident of Suva, civil libertarians would raise the issue with the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship.

Well, now it’s arisen in France, where a Muslim woman, resident in Paris for the past eight years and married to a Frenchman with whom she has three children, has been denied French citizenship.

Faize Silmi is a Moroccan-born Muslim who applied for citizenship, and has been denied it by the French Government, not because she’s a member of a terrorist group or because she’s done something to undermine the laws of the state? No, she’s simply been following her conscience and the dictates of her culture and religion by wearing traditional clothes, a head-to-toe niqab in which only her eyes can be seen when she’s in public. While this dress code may be radically different from the haute couture fashionistas of the Parisian fashion scene, and many Westerners consider it to be an aspect of Muslim male dominance, it is nonetheless a custom of millions of women in the Islamic world.

France has a penchant for enforcing laïcité, the national code of secularism. Recently, children in French public schools have been banned from wearing conspicuous religious symbols such as Christian crucifixes, Sikh turbans, Jewish skullcaps and Muslim headscarves. They’re fine to be worn in religious private schools, but not in the state-run educational or government institutions.

The refusal of citizenship to Madam Silmi is fully supported by France’s Minister for Urban Affairs, Fadela Amara, herself a Muslim of Algerian descent, who describes the niqab as a prison and a straitjacket for women; and the ruling has received unequivocal support among France’s political elite. The Minister went on to say, “The niqab is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that promotes inequality between the sexes and is totally lacking in democracy.”

Perhaps, but the French ruling opens up a very nasty can of worms. Ultra-orthodox Jews wear hats and jackets fashioned in the 18^th Century; is this a reason to refuse them citizenship if they want to live in France? The Scots wear kilts and Indians wear dohti, but is this sufficient reason to prevent them from becoming citizens of France?

And when we think beyond clothes, to what extent does a migrant have to conform to the cultural norms of a society in order to qualify for citizenship? Language is an obvious pre-requisite for integration into the host society; yet many first generation migrants have poor language and literacy skills in the new language, and leave it to their children to deal with officialdom. Yet these migrants and their offspring usually settle in well and the vast majority become the building blocks of the future society. Think of the cultural value which generations of migrants have added to America or Canada or Australia. When previous migration patterns happened, did anyone question why elderly Greek or Italian people could only converse in the language into which they were born?

Immigration doesn’t have to mean conformity, although traditionally migrants, infused with a developing love of their new land, often become more native than the natives.

But the issue for the French government isn’t as simple as putting some muscle into multiculturalism. France has a huge Muslim population, most from its former colonies in North Africa, a vast majority of which has failed to integrate. Riots in the Parisian banlieues which lasted from October and November 2005 were in large measure because of the lack of integration by Muslim youth into French society.

But that’s a reason to tighten immigration laws, not to ban a person from citizenship because of the clothes she wears…..