Algerian workers in France lived in squalor while remitting vital billions home.

Evidence

The same could not be said about the other side of the coin, the Algerian immigrant workers in France. Granted certain preferential treatment by Evian, driven from home by persistent unemployment to prosperous, labour-hungry Europe, their numbers had mounted steadily ever since the war ended, until by 1973 they were close on 800,000. For the most part these Algerians lived like third-class citizens, their plight concealed from the eyes of other Frenchmen. Existing in rat-infested bidonvilles, or six to a tenement room, without women and on the poor food that their rock-bottom wages would provide, over eighty per cent of the Algerian workers performed the travaux pénibles; generally the heavy, dangerous or distasteful labour eschewed by Frenchmen. Nearly three-quarters of them were illiterate, and therefore unlikely ever to better themselves. But every year they were able to send home an impressive total of one milliard francs (then £100m.), vital to the Algerian economy. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1663

Categorization

• XREF: The labour migration / remittance economy extends the book’s colonial-resistance theme into metropolitan France. — connects to: Algerian immigrant remittances helped fund the F.L.N.’s war against France. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1637; Algerian migrant wages in France funded F.L.N. weapons against French conscripts

Related

• Algerian immigrant remittances helped fund the F.L.N.’s war against France. (similarity 0.93)
• Algerian migrant wages in France funded F.L.N. weapons against French conscripts (similarity 0.87)
• Algerian migrant workers in France returned home carrying radical political ideas. (similarity 0.82)
• European settlers actively aided the F.L.N. and died for the Algerian cause (similarity 0.81)
• Post-war France’s economic boom absorbed over a million pieds noirs. (similarity 0.80)
• The Algerian War’s aftermath migrated with émigrés into France’s banlieues (similarity 0.80)
• French workers’ domestic resistance to capitalism shortened Algeria’s war (similarity 0.79)
• Algerian Muslims earned roughly one-thirtieth of European earnings yet paid proportionally heavier taxes. (similarity 0.79)
• The F.L.N. physically extended its Algerian terror and fundraising methods to metropolitan France. (similarity 0.79)
• Most of the million-plus pieds noirs resettled in metropolitan France (similarity 0.78)
• By 1917 only a fifth of Algeria’s non-Muslim settlers were French-born. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Algerian migrant wages in France funded F.L.N. weapons against French conscripts #corroborates (0.40)