The Politicisation of Immigration and Race in France: Towards a Process of Racialisation?

Abstract

In a study of the French surveys on immigration between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s, political scientist Daniel Gaxie and his colleagues (Gaxie 1995) showed that the questions opinion polls ask have changed somewhat. In the beginning of the period, surveys about immigration were scarce, and mainly published in left-wing newspapers; they asked French people questions about migrants’ living conditions – for example, if, according to respondents, the state was doing enough to ensure them access to good housing – or if they thought that the French people were welcoming enough to those workers from abroad who were helping the French economy to perform better. Gaxie et al. noticed a change at the beginning of the 1980s: surveys about immigration then became more frequent, and were published in many more newspapers, especially in right-wing newspapers. Questions started to change, and mainly focused on the legitimacy of the presence of migrants on the French territory (‘do you think there are too many foreigners in France today?’), on their capacity or their willingness to ‘integrate’ in French society, the necessity to send back some categories of migrants, the links between immigration and delinquency or unemployment, the dangers French society faces because of the presence of migrants and the respondents’ self-definition (between ‘quite racist’ to ‘not racist at all’).