In the autobiographical novel Shantytown Kid by Azouz Begag, what were the challenges Algerian immigrants and their children faced in making their lives in 1960s France?
Because of its scale and long history, Algerian immigration has been more significant for France than most other immigrations.
By and large uninterrupted since the beginning of the twentieth century, it continues to be seen as an example of “problematic” immigration and in practice it gives rise to some specific difficulties.
The results of the 2008 Trajectoires et Origines inquiry conducted by the National Institute for Demographic Studies (Institut national d’études démographiques, or INED) point up a higher than average rate of unemployment, a lower rate of home ownership, and stronger perceptions of discrimination than in other communities.
More broadly, the singular relationship between the French state and people of Algerian descent has been demonstrated by their particular involvement in certain events over the last thirty years (for example the urban riots of the 1970s, the March for Equality and Against Racism in 1983, the pitch invasion at the 2001 France-Algeria football match, and rallies in the 2000s to campaign for acknowledgement of the police massacre of protesters on October 17, 1961). The colonial history of this migration is often evoked to explain its particular status in contemporary French society.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, many studies have addressed French immigration policy both during and after the colonial period and have validated the Algerians’ unique place in this history.
A rule of exception originated with the Évian Accords, which theoretically gave Algerians the same rights as the French (apart from political rights) and delivered a system that favored them in terms of access to French territory, to the labor market and to French citizenship. However, Alexis Spire has been able to show that these derogation arrangements also perpetuated practices “issuing from the colonial experience,” some of which were discriminatory (deportations for example).
Thanks to studies that have appeared in the last thirty years, the social history of this migration is well known as regards both the colonial era and the Algerian War of Independence.
All these studies have been strongly influenced by the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad’s seminal article on the “three ages of Algerian emigration,” originally published in 1977, which modeled the evolution of this migration process.
Building on colonial sociology, Sayad identified a first age dominated by temporary immigration (noria), consisting of married men, before a movement towards workerization, leading to the second age and a phase of increasing stability.
The third age, developing out of the second, was marked by the formation of a “mini colony,” caught up in the “illusion of a temporary migration”: the migrants themselves lived under the impression that they would return, and this was perpetuated by both the French and Algerian authorities. This age also saw families becoming established, in a gradual transformation from an immigration for work to an immigration of settlement.