IX

Regulating the Immigrant Worker during the Depression

SOCIETY bears the cost of economic crisis unequally. Those with economic and political power often displace the burden of economic hardship on those lacking such power. In modern times this has meant mostly the layoff of wage-labor.¹ Yet after World War I, in France and other capitalist democracies, the state rather than merely the “market” has allocated hardship by denying rights and entitlements to the less powerful. The burden of economic crisis began to fall upon a new but significant sector of the population—the non-citizen immigrant worker.

Universal male suffrage and the consequent threat of socialism forced the state to accommodate those interests of the native working classes which did not threaten the vital needs of the economically dominant classes. The result was that the costs of economic crisis were less easily deposited in the laps of French wage earners. To a limited degree the political rights of French workers counterbalanced their economic dependence. This was not true, however, for those workers who lacked voting rights: the non-citizen immigrant.

There were powerful incentives for shifting the social costs of and responsibility for the depression onto the immigrants. Not only did they not share in the national community, being—like the Jews in Germany—perceived as cultural outsiders, but also they had no political and few civil rights. Thus the state denied to the immigrant services and protection to which the French citizen was entitled. The government not only intensified its well-established policy of excluding new immigrants from the labor market, as it had done during the recessions of the 1920s, but it went further; it attempted to flush immigrants out of the national economy no matter how long they had been working in France. Discrimination against the non-citizen worker provided a relatively inexpensive and popular alternative to other forms of social crisis management. Public works, increased unemployment compensation, nationalization or price supports were positive means of stimulating the economy, but they were also divisive. In contrast, most Frenchmen could rally to the nationalist appeal of blaming the foreigner for the depression and expelling him as a solution to the crisis. Placing the burden of the depression on the immigrant served a conservative purpose: it placated French workers, who might otherwise seek structural reforms. It shifted the responsibility of unemployment onto the immigrant (for taking Frenchmen’s jobs) and away from the economic decision-makers or the economic system itself. These strong motives for blaming the immigrant and making him pay the price of the crisis were acted on in a variety of government decisions in the 1930s.

Yet equally powerful forces restrained this scapegoat policy. Immigrants had become an integral part of the workforce. They were critical in the secondary sector of a dual labor market in which the French dominated the primary sector. As a result, both French workers and employers resisted a policy of purging aliens from these jobs and shifting these professions to the French. As miners, ditch diggers, steel workers, and fruit pickers, immigrants were irreplaceable. Few Frenchmen would accept these jobs. A wholesale attack on the limited rights of immigrants was also inconsistent with the desire of many French to assimilate a portion of the foreign population. In the face of French demographic stagnation and thus an inadequate manpower pool for the military, young foreigners were a national asset.

The result of these contradictions was an immigration policy in the 1930s which was torn between extremes: on the one hand, French governments periodically blamed immigrants for French unemployment and offered to purge them from the workforce. These campaigns coincided with particularly sharp dips in the economy and the rise of a demogogic right. On the other hand, all governments of the 1930s recognized the necessity of immigrants in the French economy and society. They used the opportunity of the depression to further restrict the immigrant to the secondary labor market. At the same time they granted a small degree of mobility to classes of immigrants which the government hoped to assimilate. In any case the government forced the immigrants to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of the depression, placed them in an even more regulated environment, and caused them to suffer profound insecurity owing to the constant shift of policy.

The Xenophobic Response to the Depression

With the first signs of economic crisis in late 1930 came agitation to remove the immigrant worker. Beginning with organized labor, it soon became a cause for the nationalist right. Initially, the depression stimulated a spontaneous and often illegal immigration which intensified competition between French and foreign workers. France’s delayed entry into the depression and thus her relatively favorable employment situation led jobless Italians to scramble across the Alps in search of work. Some 70,000 foreigners found jobs after irregular entry in 1930, as compared to only 43,928 in 1929 and 21,505 in 1928.² As early as June 1930, trade unions in southeastern France, especially Corsica, complained that Italian workers with no work permits were being hired in preference to the French.³ Placement office officials and police reported a flood of irregular Italian workers entering the Marseilles and Grenoble regions and noted the potential for labor unrest.⁴ Despite relatively smooth relations between frontaliers and French unions, the prospect of depression excited bitter opposition to these commuters from Belgium and Germany.⁵

The construction and other vulnerable trades throughout France’s urban centers were also threatened by immigrants. The construction industry was hit by early and particularly severe unemployment; further, the French worker was often at a disadvantage against the cheaper and more skilled Italians. In September 1930, the CGT construction unions claimed that Paris was “flooded with foreigners” who threatened to take the few jobs available during the winter’s “dead season.”⁶ French employed in seasonal or unstable occupations such as the garment trade, hotel and restaurant services, or entertainment also feared foreign competition, for immigrants could easily be hired illegally, often through private placement services.⁷

Protest took a variety of forms. CGT hotel and restaurant unions in February 1930 requested the Labor Ministry to outlaw the private recruitment of foreigners.⁸ Entertainment unions demanded that the Paris prefect encourage employers to give priority to the French.⁹ The garment unions even joined with management in November to demand government controls over immigrant-owned sweat shops, which employed many illegal immigrants. Because of the low pay offered these foreigners, the immigrant shops were a threat, the delegates declared, “as harmful to the employers as to French workers.”¹⁰

At the request of the construction and garment unions, the CGT sent a delegation to the Labor Ministry in late October 1930. It demanded that immigration be controlled and that foreign work permits be shortened. Minister Pierre Laval agreed to limit new immigration to temporary construction projects and to sharply curtail new work permits.¹¹ As early as November placement offices rejected most applications for work permits from irregular immigrants and limited the validity of the permits for temporary workers to the period of employment (three to six months).¹² Police also stepped up their enforcement of identity card rules and increased five-fold its prosecution of violators of the law of 1926, which prohibited immigrants from changing occupations for one year after being admitted to France.¹³ These measures, similar to those taken during the recessions of the 1920s, were designed to limit new immigration, restrict the mobility of immigrants already in France, and thus prevent their competing with Frenchmen in sensitive urban job markets.

Such efforts could hardly placate labor for long. They affected mostly immigrant job seekers rather than the 1.4 million immigrants already employed. However, with increased layoffs in 1931, some unions began to demand that employers discharge the immigrant first.¹⁴ The CGT leadership, long committed to a policy of regulating foreign labor through the work permit system, was slow to favor a policy of discriminatory layoffs. Repeatedly in 1931 the CGT’s executive council reminded French workers that immigrants with work permits had a legal right to their jobs and condemned xenophobia.¹⁵ Yet, as the depression deepened, both labor and nationalist groups began to demand that immigrants be purged from the workforce and replaced with unemployed French.

Conservative deputies reported to the Chamber that French citizens were discharged rather than immigrants in the textile, chemical, metals, and construction industries.¹⁶ Veterans’ groups defended the French against immigrant taxi drivers and sponsored a boycott of restaurants that used foreign orchestras.¹⁷ In January of 1931 a small but active nationalist group, the Confédération des syndicats unionistes, began agitating against foreign workers in the Paris region. This group had been organized by G. Hervé, the former anarcho-syndicalist, turned ultranationalist. The unionistes plastered working-class districts with posters which called for “jobs first for the French, who never hesitated to do their duty in war.”¹⁸ Hervé’s newspaper, La Victoire, proposed a law to limit foreign workers to a percentage of each occupational group.¹⁹ Communist organizers of the unemployed in the Paris suburbs feared the impact of this nationalist campaign on French workers. At a conference of committees of the unemployed held in December of 1931, a communist organizer admitted that “the majority of the French workers will accept only with difficulty being treated equally with foreign comrades.”²⁰ In order to counteract the propaganda of the unionistes, a special edition of L’Humanité was distributed in the industrial suburbs of Boulogne and Billancourt.²¹

In the fall of 1931, as unemployment rose sharply, the conservative and ultra-right press also exploited the anti-immigrant theme. Included in this group were L’Action française, L’Ami du peuple, and L’Intransigeant. They emphasized the need for French solidarity against the “invasion” of foreigners. A common theme was that every job taken by an immigrant was a job stolen from an unemployed French wage earner. If the foreigners were only dismissed, the French could all have jobs.²²

In the face of this tide of xenophobia, a law to reduce the immigrants in the workforce seemed inevitable. However, countervailing forces from the right as well as the left checked this trend. Many business groups who shared the conservatism of the xenophobes on the right, did not, however, wish to lose their access to immigrant labor. For example, a delegation from the Confédération nationale des Associations agricoles and de Warren of the Societé générale d’immigration (SGI) lobbied the government to continue the flow of farm labor. They claimed that any attempt to substitute the unemployed French for immigrants would fail, for Frenchmen would not take farm jobs. Construction employers and textile interests made similar appeals against restrictions which impeded the flow of immigrant labor.²³ In November 1931, the influential daily newspaper of heavy industry, La Journée industrielle, denounced rash measures, arguing that “for the sake of the future, immigrants must be allowed into the trades in which the French will never work.” The same message came from Le Temps, Bulletin quotidien, Le Nord industrielle, and L’Usine.²⁴

This dependence of the French economy on foreign labor was obvious: in March 1931 still 42 percent of the miners, 30 percent of the construction workers and 38 percent of the metallurgical laborers were immigrants. Any policy of sharply reducing foreign employment and shifting unemployed French into immigrant jobs would have been difficult at best. Yet if the business press was correct in proclaiming the economic folly of the anti-immigrant proposals of the nationalist press, their stance was hardly disinterested. After all, immigrants were generally cheaper and more docile than the French.

Despite their rhetoric, the xenophobic right did not seriously threaten the heavy users of immigrants for the right defended primarily the privileged or popular occupations from foreign intrusion. Likewise, union opponents of immigrants sought protection from the encroachment of cheap foreigners in their specific trades rather than the wholesale purge of immigrants from the French economy.

Moreover, the labor leadership as well as the socialists and communists stalled the stampede toward xenophobia. While the CGT leadership and the socialists were committed to defending French workers from foreign competition, they supported immigrants who were threatened with involuntary repatriation. In 1932, the CGT Miners’ Federation organized the Fédération des émigrés polonais en France which lobbied for extended pension and union rights for Polish miners. In the depths of the depression, Le Tribune des mineurs (CGT) argued that the repatriation of Poles would lead only to a speed up of French workers and decreased production.²⁵ In 1933, the CGT leadership declared: “in spite of bad appearances. . . . [immigrants] are an element of stability, of activity and prosperity which the nation can scarcely spare, without leading to grave harm.”²⁶

The communists in the early 1930s were even more bold in their defense of immigrants. At their 1933 congress, the CGTU pledged support for unemployment benefits for aliens and denounced expulsions. Their communist-dominated trade union reaffirmed its support for “free borders” for “colonial” as well as European workers and the elimination of government regulation of foreign labor. This alone would “safeguard the rights and work of all the proletariat.” In Paris the communists organized foreign labor sections of their unemployment committees and in the northern coal mining region they organized protests of Polish miners who had been expelled. This defense of foreign workers doubtlessly isolated the communists from many French workers (they admitted as much at their 1933 Congress) and contributed to the success of a nationalist workers’ movement in the 1930s (led by Jacque Doriot and Marcel Deat); yet it may have also diffused the xenophobic pressure within the working classes.²⁷

This ambiguous political climate jelled in November 1931 during a debate in the Chamber of Deputies over growing unemployment. Quickly the debate turned into an attack on immigrants and to a series of proposals presumably to protect French labor from foreign competition. The far right led the way. Throughout the 1920s, ultraconservatives called for a labor tariff, a tax on businesses that hired foreign wage earners. This was based on a moral appeal to French solidarity rather than any careful analysis of economic realities.²⁸ However, in 1931, their position changed somewhat by their efforts to link the tariff to French unemployment. For example, Paul Ledoux submitted a bill which obliged employers to deposit five francs per day for each foreign worker into a fund for work relief. Amedieu du Clos, in addition, proposed that the rate of taxation be linked to the level of unemployment. Claiming that France had become the “milch cow of Europe,” he advocated increased funding for the expulsion of indigent illegal aliens rather than putting them on relief. The right linked French unemployment to the presence of immigrants. Employers who hired foreigners were to pay the cost of relief which was the consequence of foreigners taking jobs which rightfully belonged to the French.²⁹

The socialists, of course, opposed these illiberal appeals for massive expulsions.³⁰ In Le Populaire Paul Ramadier stressed that a socialist bill would attempt to protect the immigrant from the nationalist onslaught.³¹ The socialist proposal promised unemployment relief for laid-off immigrants and equal status with the French for immigrants with French spouses or children and for the frontaliers. Yet the socialist proposal also sought to prevent “so-called immigrant farm workers” from taking French jobs in industry and to prevent “unscrupulous subcontractors” from using hapless aliens as a battering ram against French labor standards. Thus the socialists advocated that the border be closed to new immigration and that a limit of 10 percent be placed on all new hiring.³² A similarly restrictive bill was proposed by the left-center Radical Socialist Party.³³

Neither the proposals of the far right or those of the left gained the support of the Labor Commission of the Chamber. These bills were too inflexible to appeal to the right-center majority. In deference to the concerns of business, the relatively mild bill of Leon de Tastes and Pierre Taittinger was adopted by the government. Instead of a flat 10 percent maximum on hiring immigrants, the government’s proposal authorized merely the possibility of quotas. These would be determined by a complex procedure: only after a petition from a labor or employer association would the National Labor Council initiate an investigation to determine a specific quota.³⁴ This procedure guaranteed that only those industries which were organized by strong unions with serious grievances against foreign competition would be affected. Industries where unions were weak but that also had large numbers of immigrants (e.g., auto, steel, and chemical) would be unlikely candidates for quotas. This bill also encouraged conservative local unions to collaborate with employer associations (e.g., the garment industry) against immigrant workers and employers. Furthermore, despite socialist efforts to include agriculture, farm interests in the Chamber excluded agriculture from the bill.³⁵

The result was a second “Law for the Protection of National Labor,” promulgated in August of 1932.³⁶ It would hardly fulfill the promise of its title. Indeed, it was probably the most moderate measure possible in response to the economic crisis of the winter of 1931 which finally brought the Great Depression to France. Pressure for additional legislation quickly faded in 1932, especially with the election of a center-left parliament.³⁷ Anti-immigrant reaction, so strong in 1930 and 1931, gave way in 1932 to the relatively moderate and prosaic administrative manipulation of the foreign workers by government and employers.

The Government Retakes the Initiative: 1932–1934

Despite the success of anti-immigrant opinion in imposing the quota law on the nation, the Ministry of Labor had little enthusiasm for it. Indeed, the state bureaucracy felt threatened by this law for it competed with the regulatory machinery already in place, and, from the standpoint of the functionary, it gave unreasonable power to local special interest groups.³⁸ Yet even these groups were slow to participate. While the CGT encouraged its unions to request quotas, few did so. Not surprisingly, only two employer associations took the initiative (from the hat and public works industries). As late as October 1934 (when records cease), only unions from the construction, leather, clothing, hat, barber, hotel, food service, and entertainment industries had petitioned for quotas. A number of local unions, both from the CGT and independent, also filed requests to limit foreign employment. The law was used only by the more conservative unions (no communist locals filed petitions) and these primarily represented craft trades. No national union in heavy industry, where most of the immigrants were concentrated, requested a ceiling on foreign employment.³⁹ The quota law, which was initiated with such demagogic fever in 1931—1932, was scarcely more than a public relations measure. It surely served the conservative idea of linking unemployment to immigration and it may have mollified small groups of skilled workers from especially aggrieved trades. Yet, with the exception of the construction industry, it did not touch industries in which immigrants were concentrated. Neither employers, the state, nor even the unions seriously pressed for its implementation. Furthermore, it was clearly impractical. To be effective the quotas had to force employers to lay off the number of immigrants above a legal ceiling allowed for that industry. Then presumably French workers would replace these foreigners. In effect, French occupational migration was to solve the unemployment problem. However, this was easier said than done. As Stephane Wlocewski observed in 1935, 42 percent of the immigrants worked in towns of less than 3,000 inhabitants. These workers, in small and often isolated labor markets, could not easily be replaced by natives without great cost and probably greater resistance. Even in Paris, the presumably expendable foreigners were concentrated in trades which could not easily find French applicants (for example, brick, glass, chemical, and excavation industries).⁴⁰ The Coal Committee was probably right when it declared that the Poles were irreplaceable, especially in underground mining.⁴¹ Furthermore, even if French replacements were available, it was likely that they would be older, less skilled, and thus less productive than immigrants. Finally, the fact that no national union in heavy industry applied for quotas may indicate that not enough French wanted immigrant jobs in these industries to prompt a movement for quotas.

If the Law for the Protection of National Labor of 1932 was a failure, there were still other ways of controlling immigrant employment. The state already had a large tool chest of regulations which were more consistent with economic realities than the quotas. First, in order to reduce the immigrant labor pool the state drastically restricted new immigration after 1930 (see Table 23).⁴² Not only was there a precipitous decline of immigration but much of the post-1930 influx was in agriculture, especially the seasonal sector. Also, about 60 percent of the industrial immigrants were hired for temporary sugar and distillery jobs.⁴³ These seasonal workers were automatically repatriated at the conclusion of their contracts and thus prevented from entering the permanent job market.⁴⁴

The state also used its administrative powers to encourage repatriation. Beginning in March 1932, the Labor Ministry provided funds for local officials to transport unemployed immigrants to the French frontier. If the offer of a free ride was not sufficient, the prefects were to “persuade” them to accept it.⁴⁵ The placement offices sharply reduced the proportion of work authorizations granted, thus denying the immigrant the obligatory identity card. For example, only 32 percent were granted in the Seine in 1932.⁴⁶ Immigrants who were unable to obtain authorized work or who attempted to change jobs were encouraged to repatriate.⁴⁷

In addition to limiting the size of the labor pool, the state continued its already long-established policy of restricting immigrants’ job mobility. The placement offices routinely denied work authorizations for jobs favored by the French and channeled immigrants back into agriculture and mining.⁴⁸ The Foreign Labor Service continued to send foreigners out of large urban areas: in 1931, for example, 74 percent of its job placements were outside urban regions.⁴⁹ Finally, to supplement these economic restrictions, the police increased expulsions.⁵⁰

Business much preferred this plethora of administrative restriction to the quotas for they did not enhance trade union power, nor did they interfere as directly with employers’ rights to make personnel decisions.⁵¹ Yet some industries did carry out their own policy of massive dismissals of immigrants. In the iron mines, for example, 23 percent of the foreign workers were laid off in 1932 in contrast to only five percent of the French.⁵² The Coal Committee reported that only 17 percent of the French were dismissed between 1931 and 1935, while 33 percent of the immigrants lost their jobs.⁵³ To a degree, government controls were unnecessary for industry carried out a parallel policy. Between 1932 and 1934 administrative controls and private business initiatives dominated immigration policy.

A Period of Constriction: November 1934 to the Popular Front

This fairly moderate immigration policy of 1932–1934 could not withstand the tide of popular discontent over unemployment and the rightist exploitation of the immigrant issue. By the end of 1934, the political climate was again ripe for anti-immigrant demagoguery: unemployment had been rising sharply in the fall of 1934⁵⁴ and a rightist movement had been growing rapidly ever since the violent anti-republican demonstrations in February. The right was ready to lead the call for “France First for Frenchmen.”

Opposition to foreign labor mounted from many quarters in the fall of 1934. Unemployment prompted construction and food service unions to complain that the government was lethargic in implementing their requests for quotas.⁵⁵ A series of reports on unemployment from local governments, submitted to the Labor Ministry between October 1934 and August 1935, reveal deep hostility to immigrant workers. All but four of the thirty-four reports called for greater restrictions on foreign labor as a solution to unemployment.⁵⁶ A concise summary of the stronger resolutions came from the Meuse in eastern France:

Shall we finally decide to get rid of those who desert our farms, who come from who knows where to take bread from the mouths of our unemployed, empty the treasury, exhaust the funds of the welfare offices, and who too often join the criminal class?⁵⁷

The departments of Isère, Gard, Moselle, Loir-et-Cher, Loiret, Cher, and Creuse also proposed tough new barriers on immigrants shifting from agriculture to industry. A number of communal councils resented spending local funds on unemployment benefits for immigrants. Some requested the Paris government to repatriate all foreigners on the dole.⁵⁸

By the end of 1933, the right again proposed draconian restrictions on immigrants as a solution to the ever deepening depression. A clause added to the finance bill of 1934 would have required a tax of five francs a day for each immigrant worker over 5 percent of the labor force in any workplace. On March 8, 1934, Paul Deudon proposed an immediate ceiling of 10 percent on foreigners employed in any trade because in his opinion the 1932 quota law was too low, and Paul Raynaldy went to the extreme by offering a bill in November which demanded that all foreign workers be fired by a fixed date.⁵⁹

Xenophobia in the mass-circulation press also reappeared. In November 1933 L’Ami du peuple and L’Action française echoed the slogan “Le travail aux français d’abord.” Even the radical-inspired newspaper L’Homme libre demanded that more illegal aliens be expelled. It justified this proposal by quoting E. Herriot, who said, “we intend to love all nations, but we love ours first.” Le Jour was more direct on November 3: “In Paris there are sixteen unemployed French for every twenty-three foreign workers; in the provinces there are thirty-nine for one-hundred.”⁶⁰ In spite of this upsurge in anti-immigrant sentiment, none of these bills got beyond parliamentary committees. They did, however, produce a hostile reaction from the major employers of immigrant workers, including agricultural, construction, textile, and coal interests as well as the Confédération générale du production française, the major national employers’ organization who again defended their right to immigrant workers.⁶¹

Despite the opposition of employers, pressure for more decisive action led the government to accommodate the protectionist sentiments of the right with whom it was increasingly identified. In March 1934, the center-left government gave way to a right-leaning one, the National Union of Gaston Doumergue, and later cabinets led by Flandin and Pierre Laval. Soon after becoming premier, Flandin promised “priority to French workers in the job market” so as “to show the workers that the union of Republican parties can only be a benefit to them.”⁶²

The government demonstrated its solidarity with the French wage earner in a series of extraordinary measures which claimed to do the impossible: eliminate French dependence on foreign labor to the benefit of national workers. Besides placating public opinion, these measures further tightened the net of regulation and control around the immigrant. In response to the xenophobic campaign, in November of 1934 the government formed the Comité interministeriel pour la protection de la main-d’oeuvre française (Cabinet Committee for the Protection of French Labor). Under the leadership of Edouard Herriot, the sometimes Radical premier, the committee had the responsibility of drafting new immigration legislation. Herriot committed himself to “remedy a situation revealed by a comparison of two figures: 350,000 unemployed French workers on relief and 800,000 foreign workers with jobs.⁶³ After the manner of the ultra-right, Herriot directly linked unemployment to immigrant workers.

Yet, despite a public call for a purge of immigrants from the workforce, the Committee for the Protection of French Labor in fact preserved most of the traditional policy of using foreign labor as a tool of manpower management and repopulation. The Labor Ministry continued to insist that immigrants be used to fill gaps in the workforce and to restrict immigrants to those occupations and regions. Immigrants also continued to be seen as part of the solution to French demographic stagnation, especially in anticipation of sharply reduced supplies of young workers and draftees in the late 1930s owing to low birth rates during the war. Because the French desired a permanent increase in their population, assimilation was necessary. This posed a dilemma. As an investigator for the Labor Ministry, A. Loroque, observed, “a national policy of assimilation presupposes that the foreigners not be treated . . . in a manner too different from French workers. . . . This is the only way to assure their ultimate stability.”⁶⁴ The fact that immigrants were denied citizenship rights made them useful tools in the shaping of the workforce. Yet, because this involved obvious discriminatory treatment, immigrants had little reason to develop loyalties to France. This, in turn, posed a social threat which grew more grave as the war approached and compromised French repopulation plans. Immigrant loyalty and assimilation required equality of opportunity, a goal which contradicted the main thrust of French policy.

In response to these complex problems Herriot’s committee proposed a policy of both increased constraint and greater liberality toward immigrant workers. First, it recommended a number of measures designed to encourage foreigners to repatriate. Secondly, it fashioned rules which made aliens serve French manpower needs. Third, it granted privileges, which were to encourage some immigrants to assimilate.⁶⁵

In an effort to expand the quota system, the committee decreed that all industries which employed more than 10 percent immigrants were to submit a proposal for a quota. Within six months there were 170 new quotas, one hundred more than in the two years since the passage of the law.⁶⁶ The government also began in May of 1935 a program to encourage repatriation. The Interior Ministry hired a transportation company (perhaps not surprisingly dominated by the SGI) to ship eastern European immigrants to the frontiers of their home countries. Although this program lasted barely a year, it was an improvement over the previous policy of dumping penniless immigrants on the eastern French frontier; for Swiss and Belgian authorities had simply sent them back across the border.⁶⁷

As a further encouragement of repatriation, the Labor Ministry asked local governments to carefully screen immigrants for relief payments and to repatriate indigents. The Interior Ministry also demanded that the prefects exercise more rigor in expelling undesirable foreigners, reminding them in a circular of January 1935 that they could expel any immigrant, even those who had not violated a law.⁶⁸

The Labor Ministry also significantly modified the rules governing work authorizations, increasing the requirement for continuous residence in France from five to ten years before an immigrant could be granted an automatic renewal of his work permit.⁶⁹ This threatened the jobs of many foreigners who had made short visits to their homelands despite an otherwise long stay in France. The placement offices were to find Frenchmen to take these immigrants’ jobs.⁷⁰

Finally, in an effort to increase the efficiency of the controls, in December of 1934 the Labor Ministry gained authority over the agricultural foreign labor service, much to the irritation of farm interests.⁷¹ Also, in April 1935, the Labor Ministry’s inspectors were given police powers over immigrants which had formerly been in the ineffective hands of the local gendarmes.⁷²

Business also did its part: for example, in 1934 coal mining companies organized and financed special trains to repatriate unwanted Polish families to their homeland, resulting in the exodus of 7,687 miners (18,922 Poles, including family members) between 1933 and 1934.⁷³ As a result of these policies, there was a 60 percent increase in recorded repatriations in 1935 (67,215).⁷⁴

At the same time as the government sought to purge France of unwanted foreign workers, the Committee for the Protection of French Workers affirmed established manpower policy by restricting the mobility of alien workers. In February of 1935, the government prohibited immigrants from leaving the department where they had obtained their identity card without the approval of the prefect. Even more stringent was a rule which required immigrants to obtain work permits for each change of occupation. Formerly this was necessary only when renewing the identity card (valid for up to three years). These measures put a lid on the movement of foreigners into competitive job markets.⁷⁵

Most of these immigrants accepted silently their repatriation to an uncertain future but police in the coal regions of the north reported in 1934 that Polish miners waved red flags and shouted “down with France” as their trains left the station bound for Poland. Others complained through their unions that their employers forced them into taking “long vacations” in Poland. This was a particular hardship for not only was there little work in Poland but Poles of Westphalian origin and the young had no roots in their “homeland.”⁷⁶ The ZRP (Polish Workers’ Society) of Lille complained in a letter to Premier Flandin (August 1935) that the new regulations had created an “uncertain situation” even for those Poles able to avoid repatriation: one unemployed Polish miner could not move from the Nord to the Loire, where his family lived, because of the new travel restrictions despite the fact that he had lived twenty-five years in France. Polish families, the letter continued, faced these dilemmas: men over fifty-five years old were retired on a pension of thirty francs per month, too low to cover the one hundred franc cost of a non-laborer’s identity card. Others were denied unemployment benefits or the renewal of work permits. Desperate Polish families who tried to find work for their teenage children found that the placement offices rejected their requests for work permits. One thirteen-year-old Pole from Lens (Pas-de-Calais) was repatriated in October of 1935 to Poland although he had no relatives there and found himself “without a home and in the greatest misery.” Nevertheless, despite pledges that relatives in Lens would support him until he found a job, the Foreign Labor Service rejected his request for reentry because of the “state of the job market.” This experience of the period 1933—1936 left Poles interviewed in 1950–1952 still bitter toward France.⁷⁷ In these and many other ways the new regulations hemmed in the immigrants.

Yet, having just taken away significant civil and economic rights, the Committee for the Protection of French Workers, within three months, tempered the blow for favored groups. For purposes of encouraging assimilation, the government suspended the rule requiring a ten-year residence for an automatic renewal of the identity card for immigrants with French spouses or children born in France. This same rule was abrogated for favored nationalities—the Swiss and Belgians—whom the committee believed to have strong affinities with the French nation. Within a year, however, this privilege became meaningless as other nationalities won the same right after their home governments pressured the French into conceding equal status for their nationals.⁷⁸

What was the impact of the government’s relatively stringent immigration policy of 1934—1935? While the Committee for the Protection of French Labor hoped that their policy of encouraging repatriation and occupational immobility would help French workers obtain jobs, there is no evidence that they were successful. While unemployment decreased in 1935, a temporary expansion of the economy was more responsible than were the new anti-immigrant regulations.⁷⁹ Furthermore, placement offices noted that unemployed French workers refused to take many jobs vacated by immigrants, for they required an unacceptable move or loss of status.⁸⁰ The committee’s assimilation policy was hardly more effective. It is true that in 1935 more immigrant children born in France opted for French citizenship (a 245 percent increase over 1934, or 28,026). This increase, however, probably is less an indication of assimilation than the desire of immigrant families to win protection from expulsion. Furthermore, while the government claimed to favor assimilation, the number of naturalizations granted declined sharply from 27,052 in 1933 to only 16,043 in 1935. Professional and commercial groups opposed increased naturalization for it gave citizen rights to the foreign-born worker and competitor. Despite the compelling demographic arguments for assimilation, it remained, as it had in the 1920s, subordinate to the economic advantages of denying the immigrant citizen status.⁸¹

The Impact of Government Policy, 1936

For five years the public policy of France had been to make room for the native worker in a shrinking economy by encouraging the removal of the foreign wage-earner. We have already suggested the limits of this policy. But what precisely was the impact of French discrimination on the immigrants? This subject is best approached by comparing the censuses of 1931 and 1936. Despite their limitations (e.g., undercounting immigrants), they provide our best picture of what happened to the foreign laborer.

First, immigrants suffered a vastly disproportionate share of the economic hardship of the depression. The impact of discriminatory government policy and layoffs is shown in the decline of the immigrant wage-earning population (see Table 24).⁸² Between 1931 and 1936, the number of foreign laborers dropped from 1,079,993 to only 689,898; while the foreign working class decreased by 36 percent, French wage earners declined only 12.8 percent. In fact, 27 percent of the reduction of wage earners in France came from immigrants, 4.5 times greater than their share of the laboring population. Most of those who lost jobs repatriated (thus the relatively low increase of immigrant unemployment); some, however, chose to remain in France rather than return to the insecurity of the home they left. These people sought a living from petty trade, handicraft industries, or farming, activities which government did not control. This trend is revealed in the slight increase of foreign born employers and a stable number of self-employed immigrants. These survival tactics, of course, aroused the ire of French merchants and artisans (see p. 211).

Immigrants in some sectors of the economy fared much worse than in others. As Table 25 indicates,⁸³ those industries which had the sharpest contractions of French manpower also eliminated the highest proportions of immigrant wage earners (note: metals, building materials, construction, and mining). The rate of decline of the foreign wage-earning class was 81 percent higher than for the French. Yet there were substantial deviations from this mean rate of discrimination. Government, commerce, food, and printing industries showed extraordinary rates of discrimination against foreign employment. By contrast, because of their dependence upon immigrants, other industries were less able to discriminate against the foreigner. In agriculture, for example, there was a slight increase of immigrant labor (4 percent) compared to a decrease of French farm workers of 12 percent. Government toleration of continued immigration into agriculture and the shift of unemployed immigrants from industrial to farm jobs may explain this exceptional pattern. We also observe lower rates of discrimination in such activities as mining, woodworking, quarrying, domestic service, goods handling, and glass and brick making. Comparatively few Frenchmen would seek the jobs of immigrants in these arduous and low-status occupations. The textile and garment industries also showed a low rate of discriminatory layoffs of foreigners, probably because a foreign workforce had been well-entrenched in these industries even before World War I (especially in Paris and the Nord) and thus there was an insufficient pool of skilled French workers to replace them.

The differences in the rates of discrimination are difficult to explain because of our inability to break down the data further to isolate salient factors. Yet it seems clear that, although immigrants fared worse than the French in the shrinking economy, discrimination was limited by French dependence on the foreign worker in many critical occupations. This becomes obvious when we look at the percentages of immigrants employed in important industries (Table 26).⁸⁴ Despite large decreases in the proportion of immigrants, they remained over ten percent of the labor force in six industries.

These data document that the immigrant bore a vastly disproportionate share of the economic cost of the depression. As intended by policy makers, systematic discrimination may have placated French workers who saw many more alien workers discharged than their own countrymen. While the data cannot tell us whether Frenchmen were hired to replace dismissed foreigners, surely without the immigrants to fire many more French workers would have suffered unemployment. Yet was the dismissal of immigrants really a solution to French unemployment? Even if all the foreigners had been discharged, still this would have been insufficient to absorb the decline of employed workers in France in the first five years of the depression (a shortfall of 343,169). This was impossible, for the French economy remained dependent on foreign labor, even in the depths of the economic crisis. Despite the cushion that an expendable foreign workforce provided French leaders during economic downturns, France would never again be able to function without the immigrant workers.

The Popular Front and the Moderation of Immigrant Policy

In June of 1936 the French elected a parliament of the left. The new government, headed by the socialist Léon Blum, was supported by an uneasy coalition of socialists, radicals, and communists. It was preceeded by a unification of the two major trade union confederations—the CGT and the CGTU, who in the summer of 1936 gained unprecedented victories in organizing French labor. The Popular Front government would usher in a year of social and economic experimentation and would remain in office with diminishing power until March of 1938.

Despite the significant changes which the Popular Front brought to France, immigration policy was modified only slightly. With the trade union offensive of the summer of 1936, many immigrant workers doubtlessly were swept into the CGT. In 1935, the CGT estimated that only 50,000 foreign workers were CGT members. However, by mid-1937 the CGT claimed a membership of 350,000 to 400,000 aliens, mostly due to the growth of unionism in the textile, mining, metal goods, and construction industries where many immigrants were concentrated. This claim seems rather inflated, however, considering that it represents 58 percent of the immigrant workers recorded in the 1936 census. Moreover, the entry of immigrants into the union movement did not change the policy of the CGT. Indeed, after the CGTU joined the CGT in 1935, the newly unified CGT largely affirmed the policy of the old “reformist” leadership rather than the radical support of immigrant rights which the CGTU had at least formally espoused. The unity congress of the CGT, held in September of 1935, announced its intent to prevent arbitrary expulsions and its support for a new statute for the foreign worker which would have guaranteed immigrants equal pay and rights to the benefits of French social legislation—goals which both of the old confederations had approved. It also, however, supported the government regulation of immigrants and reaffirmed Jouhaux’s long-established plan for a National Labor Office under parity control. Not only had the policy of the “reformist” wing of the labor movement won, but the CGT offered no further resolutions on the question of immigration in its next three congresses (1936, 1937, and 1938). This issue of foreign labor had been swept under the rug.⁸⁵

The left had shown little quarrel with the economic aspects of the immigration policies of the right-leaning governments of 1934—1936. In fact, the executive committee of the CGT in March of 1935 supported the program of the Committee for the Protection of National Labor as an effective means of “ventilating the labor market.” CGT chief Léon Jouhaux particularly supported efforts to force immigrants out of the urban centers, where French workers suffered most of the unemployment. The placement offices should channel foreign labor into rural jobs and thus:

ventilate the centers which suffer from unemployment to the benefit of the regions in which there are public works projects. The places left free in the urban industries will go to the French workers who reside and have families in these towns.⁸⁶

Furthermore, the socialists, especially those with rural constituencies, demanded stricter controls over farmers importing foreign workers. Of course, the CGT opposed the repressive polices of the conservative governments of 1934—1936, alleging that they arbitrarily expelled foreigners, denied refuge to political exiles, and unfairly rejected petitions for naturalization. While the left was more willing to grant immigrants some basic civil liberties, their social base in the French working class obviously prevented their taking a liberal view toward immigrant economic rights.

Given these positions the left held before assuming power, one should not be surprised that the left in office would make few substantial changes in immigration policy. The socialist minister of the interior, Roger Salengro, did eliminate some repressive measures: in October of 1936 he revoked the rule that immigrants had to obtain authorization to move out of their department and requested the prefects not to expel immigrants simply because they were temporarily unemployed.⁸⁷ Yet the Labor Ministry of the Popular Front took a strong stance against hiring foreign farm workers and redoubled efforts to shift immigrants out of urban job markets.

In July 1936 the government announced that only in exceptional cases would farmers be allowed to recruit foreign labor. This was clearly designed to prevent farmers from replacing French workers, especially those belonging to a union, with cheap and docile immigrants. As labor minister Lebas warned in March of 1937:

employers who hope to use [immigrants] to fight improved social conditions for farm workers ought to know that all their requests for new foreign labor will be refused.⁸⁸

In December 1937 a new labor minister, Philippe Serre, claimed that many farmers hired foreign workers in order to depress wages. In order to frustrate this effort, he required employers to verify that farms were sufficiently large to employ the number of workers which were requested.⁸⁹

In a similar effort to protect French workers in the cities, the Popular Front government sought to remove the unemployed foreign competition to the countryside: this goal became somewhat feasible when, after the introduction of the forty-hour week in the fall of 1936, more jobs became available in rural industry. Although the placement services attempted to persuade French workers who were unemployable in their own districts or occupations to accept work elsewhere,⁹⁰ few would migrate. As an alternative to this “very delicate” problem of finding French volunteers, Lebas instructed the placement offices to call on foreign workers, “even to use a certain pressure to induce them to move.” He claimed that this discrimination was justified because immigrants were more mobile and often lacked family ties.⁹¹ The placement offices also discouraged immigrants from seeking higher paying or less arduous jobs. In January 1938 Serre recognized that this “attempt to force immigrant workers to remain indefinitely in the same occupation . . . would formally contradict the most simple principles of individual liberty and would constitute, in addition, a flagrant violation of the principle of equality between French and foreign labor.” He justified controls on their occupational mobility, however, because many immigrants entered France under false pretenses, with plans to move from farm and other undesirable work to better jobs.⁹²

Parliamentary spokesmen of agricultural interests, of course, resented these policies of the Popular Front, complaining that they denied employers (especially sugar beet growers) irreplaceable labor. Industrialists also often failed to cooperate with the placement services and their policy of shifting foreigners to the countryside, preferring to hire workers on the spot rather than through the bureaucracy.⁹³ Nevertheless, these policies were merely slight modifications of the previous foreign labor policies, and they soon would be reversed as the government in 1938 passed again to the conservatives. On balance, the Popular Front, in its efforts to defend French labor, was as hostile to the economic (if not civil) freedom and equality of immigrant workers as were the governments of the right.

The Final Repressive Phase: 1938–1939

With the passing of Blum’s second cabinet in March 1938, the short-run interests of agriculture and industry again took command in a conservative government. At the same time, the relatively loose job market, which was related to the forty-hour week, ended with a return to the forty-eight hour week. The government’s rightward shift also led to more repressive forms of control. The new labor minister, Paul Ramadier, pacified farmers by eliminating restrictions on hiring foreign workers.⁹⁴ Another boon to industry was a decree of May 17, 1938, which allowed labor inspectors to suspend quotas for individual enterprises.⁹⁵

The new government also abandoned the Popular Front’s attempt to mobilize foreign labor to fill the gaps in the workforce. Instead, a decree of May 2, 1938 restored the geographical restrictions on immigrant mobility which had been abrogated in October 1936. This new rule limited the holder of the identity card to work in a single department. To assure greater observance of these regulations, the law made employers legally responsible for hiring workers only in the department and profession mentioned on their cards.⁹⁶ These efforts of 1938 to stabilize the immigrants, like those to “Ventilate” them in 1936–1937, were designed primarily to assure their subservience to the requirements of the changing economy.

Furthermore, the impulse to discriminate against the foreigner was not restricted to workers. As government controls pushed immigrants out of jobs, a number became self-employed artisans and merchants. The inevitable hostility of French merchants to immigrant peddlers⁹⁷ led to a decree in 1935 which denied licenses to aliens lacking a five-year residence in France.⁹⁸ In the same year, French artisans pressured the state into requiring an identity card⁹⁹ for immigrant artisans, which was granted only after the approval of the local artisans’ council.¹⁰⁰ This tide of restrictive decrees culminated in June of 1938 when the chambers of commerce won the same privilege to vote on whether foreigners could do business in France.¹⁰¹ Opposition to foreign competition overrode traditional laissez-faire values and fears that restrictions would lead to reprisals against French business abroad.¹⁰²

Still, the demographic problem also played its part in the late 1930s. With this final revision of immigration policy before the Second World War, a new system of privileged classes was to be established. Immigrants with up to ten years’ residence could be granted only a short-term identity card (valid one month to three years). The card restricted them to work in a single profession and department. Residents of ten to fifteen years were allowed to move without restriction and were entitled to a card valid for three years, while residents for more than fifteen years were granted full occupational mobility.¹⁰³ The scale of privilege, designed to reward the most assimilated immigrants, made mobility the prize. What defined the status of foreigners was the denial of complete freedom of movement. Although this decree was implemented only slowly and probably never completely, it represented still another compromise between a policy of manipulation and one of assimilation.¹⁰⁴

After mid-1938 the state also intensified the policing of the immigrant population. By January 25, 1939, 8,405 immigrants had been imprisoned for violations of the decree of May 2, 1938. In November 1938 frontier police were increased by 1,500 men to better control the entry of illegal immigrants. In April 1939 the Interior Ministry again encouraged the prefects to recommend the expulsion of undesirables even if they had broken no law.¹⁰⁵ The mass-circulation newspaper, Le Petit parisien, praised the Prefecture of Police in March 1939 for its work of “rapidly and almost automatically cleansing” Paris of unwanted immigrants.¹⁰⁶ When 240,000 to 260,000 refugees flooded into France during the decline and fall of the Spanish republic in 1938 and 1939, the cry for police control over foreigners grew more shrill. Although this was a political migration, mostly of Spanish leftists fleeing from the armies of Franco, the threat of their competing with the French for jobs was an element in the hostile response which they received.¹⁰⁷ As in 1934—1935, the arbitrary treatment of immigrants again became a dominant policy.

During the 1930s the desire to displace the costs of the depression onto the non-citizen was zealously promoted by the far right but it also extended across the political and class spectrum. Only the communists remained the exception (at least until 1936, when their denunciations of the class collaboration of the reformist CGT ceased). The structural inflexibility of the labor force restrained the rigors of regulation. So did the French demographic policy. The effort to shift the costs of national economic failure onto the non-citizen is perhaps an inevitable by-product of capitalist democracy. Yet, as the French and other Europeans have discovered since the early 1970s, foreign workers are not expendable and the burden of economic decline cannot be fully shifted to them.