ABSTRACT
The end of the 1960s was a transitional period in the evolution of the discourse of immigration in France. It was then that a different way of perceiving immigration began to evolve and the first measures of immigration control in the modern period were introduced. Not that this signifies a complete break with the past and the construction of a new and discrete episteme. There are continuities and discontinuities in the development of the discourse of immigration which do not correspond to changes in government and make any fixing of temporal ‘periods’ fairly arbitrary. The following discussion will therefore look back-and forward-to situate the developments of the 1970s in a wider context. It will nevertheless suggest that a new consensus on immigration was constructed at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s which laid the foundations for the contemporary debate on immigration. At the heart of this consensus was a new racialisation of the question of immigration, leading subsequently to the racialisation of wider socio-economic and political questions. This process of racialisation of social relations was effected largely through a reconstructed discourse of cultural and national difference.
