ABSTRACT
Although immigration has played a key role in French demographics,economy and society since the nineteenth century, it has long been treated as a negligible phenomenon. French social sciences considered the
integration of immigrants to be of little interest until the early 1980s when
migration was still perceived as a temporary and marginal occurrence,
by policymakers as an
anomaly.1 Nonetheless, research on ethnicity, racism and ethnic minorities
grew in importance in the 1990s,2 and thereafter has become central to the
social sciences.3