Citizens, denizens and helots: the politics of international migration flows after 1945

Immigration policies in the twenty-first century are marked by restrictions and increasingly tight definitions of nationality and citizenship. It is thus sometimes difficult to remember that the climate of decision-making in the post-1945 period was very different in North America and most European countries. In France, for example the leading demographer at the influential Institut national d’Études démographiques, Alfred Sauvy, pronounced that France needed at the minimum to import 5,290,000 permanent immigrants to renew its labour force, stabilize the skewed demographic structure arising from wartime losses and reinforce its claims to Great Power status (Freeman 1979: 69).