Surviving Deindustrialization as North African Migrants in France

During the first half of the twentieth century, industrialists relied heavily on immigrants to make northeastern France the manufacturing heartland of the country. They recruited legions of Italians, Poles, and Belgians to mine the coal and iron of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Lorraine and produce vast quantities of steel and textiles. After 1945 the pace of immigration hardly slackened as North Africans, especially Algerians, became essential to industry in the region. And these migrants settled in. A labor recruitment system initially designed to cycle male workers between France and Algeria gradually gave way to family reunification and the growth of residential enclaves, halal shops, and local mosques. Though facing bigotry, North African migrants seemed at least to some sociologists to be integrating into France much as European immigrants had before them.

Then, from the 1970s on, came the long, grinding turmoil of deindustrialization, a global process that proved especially devastating to this region. Factory closures, job loss, family upheaval, and community collapse affected most everyone, but North Africans had to grapple with the additional disadvantages of their more recent arrival in France, discrimination, threats of deportation, and the animus of a rising rightwing populist movement taking hold especially in areas of industrial decline.

This paper will explore how North Africans coped with the challenges of deindustrialization in the French départements (administrative districts) of Moselle and the Nord. It will focus on strategies of family and community survival—on people’s adaptations to a diminished labor market, their decisions to remain in the region, their relationship to local institutions from schools and mosques to trade unions and advocacy associations—all with the aim of drawing comparisons with how their sociological counterparts in the Rust Belt US (African Americans and Hispanics) navigated similar terrain.