Portuguese Population in France: a Snapshot 25 Years After Their Arrival

In year 2000 Portugal is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the arrival to Brazil. The Portuguese overseas adventure is now five centuries old and more than one third of the Portuguese nationals are living outside their homeland; in France they are the largest foreign community. This paper uses the data from the French Employment Survey (Enquête de l’ Emploi) 1994 and 1995 to characterise the Portuguese population and to study individual decisions taken by the Portuguese migrants concerning naturalisation, family, residence and education. As a result of the analysis it seems that the decisions of the younger Portuguese are getting closer to the decisions of their French neighbours, increasing the gap with respect to the decisions of their countrymen who stayed in Portugal. In this very sense, we can say that some assimilation by the Portuguese is occurring in France. There is an educational convergence of the Portuguese migrants in France and the French.N/