X

Conclusion

DESPITE the decline of immigration in the 1930s, foreigners did not disappear from the French labor force. Native workers never returned to the mines, docks, construction sites, and farms in such proportions as before the First World War. The regulated flow of alien labor became a permanent feature of the economies of France and later of Western Europe. Foreign labor became a vital tool with which to finely tune an economy subject to uneven growth and sharp cyclical swings. Immigrants became pawns who were shifted to and fro in order to compensate for alternating surpluses and shortages in the job market.

A permanent reserve army of laborers emerged, defined less by their social, educational, or racial characteristics than by their legal status as immigrants. Assimilation was only an individual experience; the group status of immigrants remained. Even if the sons of immigrant Polish miners became schoolteachers or merchants in France, still other immigrants would replace their fathers in the mines. Although they performed work essential to economic growth, immigrants were denied the legal and moral rights to equal opportunity and seniority in the French labor force. When opportunity was expanding, they were channeled into jobs and regions which French workers avoided, then laid off first whenever the job market shrank.

Regulated immigration served the interests of a variety of economic groups in France, who otherwise were often in conflict. French farmers, both big and small, building contractors, mine operators, petty garment makers, and heavy industrialists in steel, autos, chemicals and other products obtained the aliens which they wanted. At the same time, by the simple fact of their birth, French workers gained the privilege of job choice and relative security. To be sure, immigration was a mixed blessing: probably slowing wage rises and impeding improvements in working conditions in some industries. Yet without controlled immigration fewer French workers could have moved into the tertiary sector or into preferred industrial jobs. Despite the significant conflicts between labor and management as well as between various business groups, the immigrant question became a pole of coalescence: each class and economic group had an interest in maintaining the immigrants’ legal status as an outsider, which deprived them of the democratic rights of the French citizen.

An Emerging Foreign Labor System

This pattern of regulated migration emerged clearly only after the First World War. Before 1914, alien workers, while denied political rights, had much more economic freedom than they would have in the 1920s. Until the war, the French were sharply divided over government control of immigration. Employers generally favored an unregulated migration, whereas labor organizations were divided between those adhering to international class solidarity and those demanding labor tariffs or quotas. Because of the political impotence of labor and the ambiguities of labor policy, government controls were few. When employers found political and economic roadblocks slowing the flow of alien workers, however, they abandoned laissez-faire and turned to the state for diplomatic aid. A reformist section of French labor shifted strategy from either labor tariffs or internationalism to cooperating with business and the state in a planned labor market. These trends coalesced during the Union Sacrée of the First World War when government, business, and labor leaders set aside traditional disagreements and cooperated under the aegis of the state. Because of the labor shortages caused by the mobilization for war, employers supported government efforts to recruit foreign workers for the war economy. Conceding defeat on a policy of exclusion and abandoning the ideals of class solidarity, reformist labor began to identify with the national economic interest: these labor leaders accepted immigration and only sought priority for the French worker in the job market. Most important, a policy goal came from this coalescence: a regulated and channeled immigration which simultaneously filled the different needs of each labor market and minimized its impact on French labor. Potentially, it could mollify competition for labor between different employer groups and reduce tensions between captial and French unions.

After the war, no capital political opposition to immigration emerged and many parties favored foreign labor as a tool to compensate for the demographic losses of the war and to aid economic growth. Yet consensus was never realized. The breakdown of the Union Sacrée and the election of the Bloc National in 1919 assured the failure of a policy of class conciliation. The subsequent split of the opposition guaranteed the impotence of the parliamentary left in shaping government immigration policy and the inability of the reformist wing of the labor movement to bargain with management over the size and placement of the foreign workforce. The potential role of government as an official broker and mediator between the classes disappeared with the failure of legislation to regulate alien labor. Agriculture abandoned a centralized immigration program and opted for a separate network for recruiting labor (aided by the Ministry of Agriculture). Heavy industry, especially mining, joined with a portion of agriculture to create the General Immigration Society, which, acting essentially independent of state control, controlled much of the new immigration from Eastern Europe. In the absence of a political counterforce, the economically dominant employer groups exercised a commanding influence over immigration policy. While there was a return to “private initiative” after 1920, employers did not entirely dispense with the state.

After the war, French employers were no longer able to dominate the international labor market. They required the assistance of the Foreign Affairs Ministry to negotiate with the foreign labor suppliers. To a degree, the fate of immigrants depended upon the relative strength of their nations vis-à-vis their employers and the French state. In the case of the Poles, the French held the winning hand. Despite the cultural cohesion of the Poles, the French had the irresistible advantage of organization and economic power, especially in the General Immigration Society and the coal operators. The Polish state and Polish interest groups in France were not only relatively weak but often cooperated with the employers. In contrast, the Italians came close to a draw: the General Commissariat of Emigration and later the fascist state frustrated French employers by channeling Italian emigrants into advantageous jobs. Finally, the North Africans and refugees, who lacked governments to protect or manipulate them, held no cards at all. They became a subproletariat among the foreign workers, hired in temporary jobs at the lowest levels of the occupational ladder. While the labor market obviously played a role in allocating foreign labor in the French economy, the external political factor was a new and important input. No longer was the skill and motivation of the individual migrant the key to his fate. From the 1920s, he became increasingly an object manipulated by organized business, the French state, and his home government.

The picture is further complicated by the survival of prewar patterns of unorganized migration, especially from the bordering nations (Spain, Belgium, and Germany). Furthermore, despite the efforts of the organizers of immigration, powerful economic interests in France prevented a rigidly rationalized foreign manpower system: many enterprises, especially in construction, urban crafts, and some heavy industries relied on a pool of foreign labor, allowed to seep spontaneously into France, to grease the gears of the labor market. As a result, through a subtle pattern of organization, regulation, and laissez-faire, the various markets for alien labor were served.

Employers’ needs dominated immigration policy in the 1920s. Yet state policy was not simply an instrument of the immediate interests of capital. The state’s responsibility for social order and political legitimization required a longer view, one which considered the socially disruptive impact of immigration. Aliens frequently broke their contracts, fled the low-paying onorous jobs into which they were recruited, converged on the urban and skilled job markets, and, like the French, sought better jobs. During the economic downturns in 1921, 1925, and 1927, they competed with unemployed Frenchmen and became a source of labor unrest. No longer could the state treat this threat to labor peace as simply a police problem as it had before the war. Immigration was no longer an isolated localized phenomenon. Despite its fragmentation after 1921, organized labor had grown substantially since 1914, and the threat of Bolshevism loomed in the minds of conservative policy-makers. Furthermore, the government had learned the rationality of avoiding violence-breeding competition between French and alien labor. Finally, although French labor had been excluded from the commanding heights of the policy-making ministries in Paris, it had staked a claim (albeit a weak one) to participate in the local placement offices. For these reasons, the state (largely through the Ministry of Labor) chose to accommodate French labor.

Departmental placement offices and the Foreign Labor Service attempted to confine job competition to manageable proportions. When French unions had a significant influence, as they did in Paris, these placement offices became miniature versions of the corporatism which had failed. The Foreign Labor Service anticipated the flood of immigrants, controlled the flow at the border, and irrigated the French landscape with them roughly according to the needs of the economy. Finally, a surrogate for the national labor office emerged in a National Manpower Council, which served as a sounding board for government policy. From the council emerged the Law for the Protection of National Labor in 1926, the only immigration legislation in the 1920s.

This massive influx of foreign labor upset more than labor peace. The manpower bias of the immigration system contributed to numerous social problems. Alien enclaves of homogeneous foreigners, which the SGI had often imported, threatened the dominant French culture. The floating population of underemployed aliens spawned crime and public health hazards. Both business and government had encouraged temporary migration but ignored the potential contribution of aliens to France’s permanent population growth. Elements within the French state (public health officials and some police, for example) as well as some politicians, especially from the Radical Party, advocated a deliberate social policy based on the American model of ethnic selection and assimilation. Despite token support for this policy (as witnessed, for example, by the new naturalization law of 1927), there was no consistent political support for massive assimilation. Such a goal was inconsistent with the subordinate economic role which employers (as well as many French workers) desired that the immigrants play. This function was contingent upon aliens remaining non-citizens, subject to a separate legal order. Another social policy had to be devised in order to reinforce the economic imperatives of immigration. This policy stressed social control through the use of residence permits (identity cards) and extrajudicial police measures. By these means the “bad apples” could be tossed out of the barrel. The inferior economic status of the aliens was augmented by their political subjugation. The social solution to the problem of immigration in the 1920s was largely reduced to legal manipulation and discretionary repression.

The new immigration of the 1920s worked reasonably well. At the expense of the economic and political freedoms of aliens, it contributed to French prosperity and social stability. In contrast to the laissez-faire pattern of migration before the war, the new immigration relegated the foreigners to the lower rungs of the occupational and class ladders. There, they provided a cheap and flexible workforce necessary for capital accumulation and economic growth; at the same time, aliens allowed the French worker a degree of economic mobility—although probably at the price of a lower labor standard than would have been possible if immigration had not occurred. This system, however, would be seriously undermined when the era of prosperity ended in 1931.

The economic crisis of the 1930s stimulated the kind of anti-immigrant opinion in France which had been dormant for a generation. This led to the quota law of 1932 and to numerous campaigns to repatriate unwanted foreigners. Despite the frequent hardships that these discriminatory actions brought to foreigners, nothing changed the fundamental dependence of key French industries on alien workers. The state’s policy mediated between the political imperative of minimizing French unemployment at the expense of foreigners and the irrepressible demand for immigrant labor.

Immigration in the growth period of the 1920s served to compensate for the inadequacies of the French work force; in the thirties it attenuated and provided a scapegoat for the economic crisis. This was possible because the legal status of the immigrants linked their freedom in France to their serving in a secondary labor market, which the French avoided. To the extent that they failed to do so, either because they exercised their own economic imperatives or became superfluous during economic crises, their freedom was curtailed. Because of their legal status, immigrants became less threatening to French labor exactly as they became more useful to business. In the interwar period immigration performed a stabilizing role, similar to the one it would play after World War II.

The foreign labor system which the French created in the interwar period was hardly a temporary response to the demographic hole caused by World War I. Rather it was a consequence of advanced industrial capitalism—one area in which France was a leader. Industrialization inevitably dried up the wellsprings of the labor supply necessary for an industrial economy. The factory was fed by the young of the countryside. Not only did industrialization lead to urbanization—reducing the flow of cheap rural labor—but it produced a decline in fertility. Industrialization created expectations of social mobility and improved material standards, which caused the working classes to withdraw from the onerous and low paying jobs which even an advanced industrial economy requires. This phenomenon occurred in France a generation ahead of the rest of industrial Europe.

In the face of these difficulties either French capital could be exported or labor imported. There were obvious costs and benefits to both approaches for business. Capital export gave the employer the use of an often totally unorganized labor force. Yet, as the French showed in their failure to exploit their own colonies, there were significant drawbacks to imperialism: the expense of the social and economic infrastructure, the lack of a disciplined and productive colonial workforce, and ultimately the threat of nationalism. “Internal colonization” or immigration had a decided advantage: it required few infrastructural investments (transportation, security etc.). Just as important, immigrants could be more efficiently selected from the semi-industrialized nations. These workers, who during the interwar period came from Poland, Italy, and Spain, required little training and already were acclimated to industrial work discipline. With relatively little cost and even less public debate and accountability, they could be channeled into specific labor markets. This was a necessary but rather successful adaptation of the market economy.

If the French foreign labor system was an outgrowth of advanced industrial capitalism, it was also a culmination of trends in capitalist democracy. One of the live questions of contemporary political economy is that of the relationship between the state and social classes in capitalist democracies: is the state an instrument of the most economically powerful classes or is it autonomous?¹ Governmental immigration policy surely was not controlled by one “leading sector” of capital: the Comité des forges and Comité des houillères (through the SGI) exercised significant influence, especially in their ability to exclude the state from regulating their migratory labor streams. Yet the state did not simply reflect the desires of big business—it mediated between various employers. Immigration contributed to the profitability of large and often expanding industries—keeping wages low, weakening labor demands for costly improvements in working conditions, and supplying the necessary unskilled labor necessary during upturns in the business cycle. At the same time, the state encouraged immigration to protect the backward (and largely small-scale) sectors of the economy—in effect prolonging the life of small business and agriculture. These employers found in the alien an alternative to costly innovation: the availability of cheap foreign workers allowed marginal or backward enterprises (for example, in the garment, leather, and textile industries) to compete without costly investments to improve productivity. As is the case today in the United States, immigrants—especially those without legal status—were a key to the survival of shoestring business or those in highly competitive and labor-intensive industries. Immigrants also provided a substitute for French youth who were no longer willing to remain on the farm filling the traditional role as farm servants and sharecroppers.

Government policy not only cushioned employers from the costs of competing for labor, which without immigration would have been scarce; it also channeled specific ethnic groups into different job markets. The government’s policy was neither to use immigrants to advance mechanization and productivity nor to shield uncompetitive industry (although the effect of policy probably went in both directions). The government was controlled neither by the growth sector nor the less vital employers or industries. France was still a relatively split economy. For example, neither agriculture nor industry (to use a crude indidator of traditional and innovative sectors) held a commanding position in population or production. Thus the state reflected a wide spectrum of employer interests; it helped to resolve one potential source of conflict between them—a shortage of labor. One indicator of the success of French democracy was its ability to mollify potentially antagonistic sectors of capital and thus to avoid the social and political dislocations which would otherwise be produced by the cost of uneven economic development. How different was the German and Italian experience between the wars!

The French state was not, however, simply the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie.” French labor had conquered a piece of the policy-making turf, however small and distant from the command center. The impact, however, of immigration policy was the opposite of what it was for capital: it tended to divide the working class into citizen and noncitizen sectors. The rights of citizenship may have had relatively little impact on the living standards of French workers in the interwar period and certainly citizenship did not reduce the economic and social distance between wage labor and capital; nevertheless, citizenship provided a privileged status for native labor vis-à-vis the immigrant—a fact which divided the working class and weakened its economic and political bargaining power.

The Legacy: Labor Immigration After World War II

Through the storm of war, France largely unlearned the experience of the interwar period. With a few notable exceptions, the immigration before 1940 was left unstudied and forgotten just as France launched still another massive program of importing labor. In 1945, as in 1919, government officials recognized that immigration was necessary for France’s growth. It became part of the plan of the National Demographic Institute for repopulating a nation which was both aging and infertile. Immigration was also an integral element of the manpower program of the General Commissariat of the Plan (Monnet Plan of 1946). Like the policy makers after World War I, the French government in 1946 favored European migration, hoping that many would settle permanently. With the closure of Eastern Europe to the capitalist west in 1947–1948 and the return of thousands of Poles to their homeland, Slavs were no longer available. Planners looked to Italy to fulfill France’s unmet needs.²

Yet Italy proved to be, as it had in the 1920s, an inadequate supplier. The inflow of Algerians filled some of the gap after 1947 when restrictions on Algerian entry into France were removed. They remained a vital source of unskilled labor until 1964 when, after Algerians gained their independence, France placed restrictions on their migration. Furthermore, as happened in the 1920s, the dominance of Italians among European aliens gradually gave way to other nationalities which had even greater numbers of unemployed: by 1960 Spaniards became the leading immigrants, to be followed in 1966 by the Portuguese. As older streams of migration dried up, France was compelled to draw on ever more distant sources of labor. Between 1963 and 1965, she signed bilateral migration treaties with a number of North African states, as well as Senegal, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Thus by the mid-1960s the government’s hope of encouraging an exclusively European migration had failed. Non-Europeans and peoples of vastly different cultures increasingly filled the ranks of the alien work force.³

In the immediate post-war period, the French state recognized the value of consensus on immigration policy. For a second time, the government attempted to fashion a working compromise between French labor and the patronat. Briefly this was achieved when the Fourth Republic established the Office national d’immigration (ONI) in 1946. It centralized all recruitment of foreign labor, in effect nationalizing the functions of the old SGI. The office also channeled alien labor into jobs and regions which lacked sufficient French labor. The ONI functioned much as the CGT had proposed in the 1920s. Moreover, it was administered by a tripartite commission which included the CGT, management representatives and the bureaucracy. The CGT representative, A. Croziat, adhered to a program of regulated immigration much as Jouhaux had during the interwar period. This final realization of the old dream of tripartitism lasted only until 1948, when it became a victim of the cold war. With the isolation of the communist-dominated CGT from French institutions, the commission broke up and the ONI became an agency of the Ministry of Labor. It functioned without and largely against the will of the largest union group, the CGT.⁴ The result of this second failure of corporatist policies was similar to what happened in the 1920s—a return to less regulated immigration. Gradually the ONI lost control over recruiting most alien labor.

Employers bypassed it by recruiting their own foreign workers either abroad or at the factory gate, where immigrants came as false tourists seeking jobs. The government tolerated this circumvention of the law by “regularizing” these workers—granting work permits and identity cards (residence permits) after immigrants had been hired. Although these “immigrants from within” were subject to a review of their work contracts, similar to the system established in the interwar period, the government was very lenient. By 1968, 82 percent of the immigrants working in France found jobs outside of the ONI.⁵

Yet this tacit government acceptance of employers’ free access to alien workers ended by the close of the 1960s. What happened should sound familiar to readers of this book: the economic boom, which had made this liberal policy acceptable, came to an end and the social costs of an unrestricted immigration became evident: immigrant-dominated slums (bidonvilles), riots against Arab and black aliens, and signs of labor militance among foreigners. In an effort to reduce the economic and social impact of spontaneous migrations, the government severely restricted regularization. Employers henceforth had to recruit alien labor through the ONI. In turn, the ONI redoubled its efforts to channel foreign labor into the secondary labor market and sought to reduce the numbers of non-European immigrants allowed to enter France. During the recession of 1973, immigration was suspended. Although the government made token efforts to improve the housing and social services of aliens in France, the main thrust of the new policy was to abandon permanent for temporary migration.⁶ Despite trade union efforts to organize foreign workers and to defend them against discrimination, in the 1970s they too accepted a regulated guest worker program.⁷

Patterns of labor migration very similar to those in France appeared throughout Western Europe, especially in Switzerland, West Germany, and Great Britain. During the boom of the 1960s immigrants from southern Europe, Turkey, North Africa and, in the case of Britain, from Commonwealth nations, flooded into Western Europe to fill unskilled and unstable jobs. By the early 1970s, aliens constituted from 10–20 percent of the work forces of these countries. With the partial exception of Britain, these industrial democracies from the beginning treated alien workers as temporary and controlled their access to the job market. Paralleling events in France, these nations became even more restrictive in the 1970s. In 1970 and 1974 the Swiss set quotas on new migration and in 1973, the Federal Republic closed its frontiers and encouraged massive repatriation. These governments used the non-citizen status of alien workers to shape labor immigration to fit the exigencies of the 1970s—economic stagnation and a perceived threat of ethnic minorities.⁸

Despite these efforts immigrants have hardly disappeared from the scene. Just as was true for France in the 1930s, guest workers today cannot be dispensed with. Western European societies have become dependent upon them to fill the jobs in the secondary labor market which show no signs of disappearing. Aliens, who have resided for long periods in Europe, have been able to bring in their families and settle permanently. Their children will become an important part of the labor force of the next generation. Furthermore, some have gained access to trade unions, political parties, and even have participated on government advisory committees in an effort to advance their interests. Democracy is contagious and efforts to permanently marginalize the non-citizen worker are bound to fail in the modern welfare state. As we have seen in the case of Italy, external pressure from sending nations will also check any policy of discrimination and exploitation of emigrant citizens of these nations.⁹

From all this are we to assume that in the long run, perhaps in a generation, the immigrants will become assimilated? Many, as individuals and families, may naturalize and join their adopted societies (although this remains difficult). Yet this will hardly remove the structural need for a foreign labor system: this study has stressed the vital economic and social functions that non-citizen labor played in one advanced capitalist democracy. It has shown that a nation like France in the interwar period required peoples from less developed nations in order to assure economic growth without social disruption. As native workers struggled for new social entitlements and as they sought social mobility, they surmounted the insecurity and dependence which characterized the lives of their 19th century ancestors. Yet without a fundamental transformation of the social order, capital still required labor willing to accept those traditional labor standards. The foreign labor system, which emerged in France in the 1920s and which has continued to the present, fitted that need. Ironically, by its very denial of democratic entitlements to the non-citizen worker, this system lessens the pressure of elites to withdraw these rights from the native citizen, especially in periods of economic decline. In the short run this stabilizes capitalist democracy in the West. In the long run, however, it subverts international stability by perpetuating inequities between the advanced industrial nations and the poor countries which supply immigrants. It also undermines democracy and social progress in Europe by creating a divided laboring class, an important part of which is denied full equality and freedom.