Immigrants, Labor Markets, and the State, a Comparative Approach: France and the United States,
1880-1930

Catherine Collomp

Immigration, by its transnational nature, lends itself to comparisons. By focusing on the degree of integration of migrants into the national societies in which they settle, scholars can establish national typologies showing different patterns of assimilation. Historians and sociologists of immigration to France, for instance, often oppose the American model to the French one, thus establishing two dissimilar patterns of integration into advanced industrial and postindustrial societies.1 To French readers, the United States is given as the archetype of a society formed by immigration. There, they learn, assimilation is accomplished smoothly but incompletely. Immigrants become Americans while maintaining strong ties with their cultures of origin: Americanization and ethnicization are two correlated products of their integration into American life. Immigrants and their descendants contribute to the formation of a multicultural society in which each ethnic group can rightly claim equal representation.2	1
In France, on the contrary, the assimilation of foreigners of previous generations has left no trace of their ethnic origins, other than religious differences. The very notion of ethnicity has no place in classic French political culture. One becomes French without hyphenation; the Republic guarantees the equal status of all individual citizens but does not recognize groups. No collective memory of the peoples that formed the greatest streams of immigration exists in the national public culture. There is no official celebration of the hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Italians, Poles, Spaniards, and eastern European Jews, or even of the North Africans, whose presence and labor have contributed to French economic life and who have shared the vicissitudes of the nation. Yet, in the last few decades, when the classic model of integration into the collective identity has been put into question by the cultural resilience of the descendants of North African immigrants, especially on the outskirts of cities rife with high unemployment levels, reference to the American model has become systematic. It is invoked either negatively, as a warning against social fragmentation, or positively as an example of a society that encourages integration while allowing the descendants of immigrants to cultivate their roots.3	2
Such comparisons are often motivated by strong political and ideological considerations. They generally appear in debates on the current evolution of French and American civic cultures.4 In this context, posited simply as one term in a comparison, the American paradigm of assimilation often becomes ahistorical. Assimilation is seen as a uniform process throughout the decades of heavy immigration, and the paradigm often leads readers to overlook the fact that among American historians themselves the nature of assimilation into American life is a subject of great debate.5 More significant for our purpose, international comparisons, as well as intranational ones, are unbalanced if they compare today's postindustrial societies to an archetypal past. In making ethnicity and race the paramount categories of social experience, they underestimate, as Gary Gerstle has argued, the nation as a "structure of power," whose use of coercion in the making of its citizens has varied over time. Today's sociological perspectives and ideological preoccupations therefore interfere with the historical analysis that would compare how the relations between immigrants and the host society were structured at a given moment. As Nancy L. Green has rightly shown, a comparison is meaningful only if it is based on the comparable units, moments, and variables that have structured immigration and integration in the two countries investigated.6	. . .