Immigrant In/Visibility in Post-Colonial France

Between 1962, date of the independence of Algeria, and 1975, the year following the end of the French guest-worker program, more than 1,600,000 foreigners migrated to France seeking a better life. Almost half of these newcomers originated from Portugal, while a majority of the remaining half came from North Africa. These men and women formed the bulk of postwar labor-migration to France. The Portuguese constituted the largest foreign group in the 1975 census and have been coming close seconds behind Algerians in all census data produced since. Despite this numerical importance, they have remained absent from debates on immigration and few people, even among specialists, pay attention to the existence in France of this very large and recently arrived foreign population. In contrast, North Africans, and more specifically Algerians and their descendants, continue to be perceived as foreign and potentially unassimilable. Using a wide-range of public and private archives, as well as numerous interviews in several French cities, this research analyzes the parallel development of North African visibility versus Portuguese invisibility from the 1960s until today.