Interwar France was the only labor-recruiting country and used identity cards to channel migrants

Evidence

In the USA, “nativist” groups claimed that Southern and Eastern Europeans were “unassimilable” and presented threats to public order and American values. Congress enacted a national origins quota system that stopped large-scale immigration until the 1960s. France was the only country to recruit foreign workers in this period, due to its substantial war losses. Migrant workers were controlled through a system of identity cards and work contracts, and were channeled into jobs in farming, construction, and heavy industry. By 1931, there were 2.7 million foreigners in France (6.6 percent of the total population). Large colonies of Italians and Poles sprang up in the mining and heavy industrial towns of the North and East of France. There were Spanish and Italian agricultural settlements in the Southwest. In the depression of the 1930s, many migrants were deported and the foreign population fell half a million by 1936 (Cross, 1983). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3857

Categorization

• XREF: The identity-card and work-contract control system echoes the reader’s interest in how states build bureaucratic infrastructures of exclusion seen in the Jim Crow and slavery literatures.
• SEED: Angle: France as the outlier labor-importer among interwar nations — the war-loss demographic logic behind it and how that specific path shaped its later, famously resistant migrant integration model.