Immigration policies, the state and labor markets. France and the United States, 1880-1930

The comparative approach is justified when enough similar variables in the subject studied in the two countries can be analysed. Allowing for time discrepancies - mass migration to the US mainly occurred before World War I, while it took place in the 1920's in France - in both cases it was a labor migration that contributed to working class formation. It is also justified because French political leaders looked to the US as the model of administrative regulation of immigration and integration. Yet the comparison is most fruitful when it reveals different paradigms in the process of integration in the two countries. Set against the absence of state intervention in the US to direct or plan immigration in function of the labor market, the collective and contractual nature of immigration policy in France linked as it was to diplomatic relations with friendly nations brings into light a sharp contrast in the relation of the immigrant to the host society. Although immigration to the US was politically interpreted and valued as the individual migrants' voluntary decision only on step removed from citizenship, the absence of state regulation in the labor market reinforced the role of ethnic groups as mediators of the migration and integration process. In France, conversely, immigrants, assisted as they were and directed to their place of work by the joint effort of employers and state agencies with the consent of organised labor, found themselves direct wards of the State which developed its administrative functions to intervene on behalf of dual labor markets. This analysis has been used to emphasize the historical construction of the silent and complete assimilation process within the working class in pre-World War II France, and that of ethnicity as an enduring category in the American society resulting from the vacuum of state rin industrial relations.