ABSTRACT
Among the various types of Significant Others discussed in Chapter 3, immigrant communities are seen to play an important role as threatening internal Others. The host-immigrant relationship is characterised by a negative and threatening representation of immigrant groups, mainly because the latter’s presence defies the social and political order of the nation. As Abdelmalek Sayad (1991: 292-9) puts it:
Immigration and its double, emigration, offer the occasion to confront in practice, through experience, the national order, namely the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘non-national’ …. The immigrant ‘endangers’ the national order by forcing to think the unthinkable, to think that which should not exist or which should not be thought for it to exist.1
