The social geography of ethnic minorities in metropolitan Paris: a challenge to the French model of social cohesion

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