1 - The Politics of Immigration

Summary

This chapter demonstrates that French arguments over the transfer of DPs to France sit at the juncture of several critical debates about post-war politics of migration and France’s diplomatic strategies in the context of the nascent Cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, DPs constituted an enticing demographic opportunity to replenish a French population denuded by two world wars and a declining birth rate. And yet the question of DP emigration defied consensus in France. Communist decision-makers and their ideological fellow-travellers on the French left were strongly opposed to the recruitment of what they regarded as fascist DPs and ‘war collaborators’. Beneath the surface of what was ostensibly a political and ideological opposition to the entry of allegedly ‘anti-communist’ DPs lay a labyrinth of economic fears, a traditional protectionist reflex, as well as a raft of moral and cultural concerns about their ‘assimilability’ and ‘desirability’. Thus despite the early high hopes attached to the transfer of fit and industrious DPs to France, it was not until April 1947 that a coordinated and significant recruitment scheme was launched by French authorities. Crucially, this chapter reveals that the selection of DPs triggered extensive controversies about how far DPs could or should be assimilated into the nation state and about the presumed superiority or inferiority of various categories of DPs and refugees.