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and those “’clandestine’ foreigners, irregular guests…unworthy of living on our soil”
who would be forcibly expelled. 91
The 1920s marked a shift in French immigration policies which previously had
been very liberal in its scope. The growth rate of the French population during the time
span 1836-1936 had been relatively flat increasing from thirty six million to thirty nine
million. A steadily declining birth rate coupled with the male casualties of the Great
War, an aging population and a need for manpower to reestablish and expand the
domestic economy and military led France to adopt an open door policy for émigrés.
During the Nineteenth Century France had received the greatest number of immigrants in
Europe and, prior to August 1914, the majority of aliens originated in Belgium, Italy and
Spain. 92
Following the War many Russians sought refuge in the wake of the November
Revolution. 93
As national recovery progressed, however, the demand for foreign labor
diminished. Thus, the French Government began to adopt more restrictive measures
(applied to the immigrant population as a whole) during the late 1920s in an attempt to
stem the tide of immigration that threatened the employment of French citizens.
Unemployed foreign workers were deported and residency permits were not renewed for
aliens working in sectors in which French laborers remained idle. Labor contracts with
91 Prefect, Gironde, to the Prefect, Bas-Rhin, June 21, 1938, ADBR D 391/19 (dos. 182), HICEM report,
“Note sur l’état actuel de l’émigration d’Allmagne et d’Autriche,” from Oungre to George Rublee,
September 7, 1938, 3, AN 14 (13/56) cited in Caron, Uneasy Asylum, 74, 181.
92 Jean Pierre Dormois, The French Economy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 2, 4.
93 Maga, “Closing the Door,” 425.
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