Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experience, 1945-1975

by Gary P. Freeman

Overview

In order to describe how the elites in two political systems grappled with the potentially explosive influx of foreign labor, Gary Freeman analyzes and compares the ways in which the British and the French governments responded to immigration and racial conflict over a thirty-year period during the post-war era. In addition to comparing the policy records of the two countries, the author focuses on the process by which political and social phenomena become defined as public problems and how alternative responses to these problems are generated. His broader aim is to provide a standpoint from which to evaluate the more general problem-solving capability of the political systems under consideration.

Professor Freeman finds that by 1975 both Britain and France had instituted tightly controlled, racially discriminatory, temporary contract-labor systems. Despite this basic similarity, however, he notes three distinctions between the two cases: while the French attempted to adapt immigration to their economic needs, the British failed to seize this opportunity; while the British moved toward an elaborate race relations structure, the French relied on criminal law and the economic self-interest of the worker to prevent outbreaks of racial violence; and the British were much more affected than the French by fears of immigration and racial conflict.

Originally published in 1979.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612386
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1783
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.70(d)

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Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies

The French and British Experience 1945-1975

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By Gary P. Freeman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07603-4

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Since the end of World War II there has been a continuing stream of workers pouring into the industrial centers of the West to man the factories and to take up the more menial tasks abandoned by European workers. These new migrants have come successively from those Eastern European countries subjected to Soviet influence, from the nations on the periphery of Europe that have lagged behind in the race to industrialize, and from the more distant and underdeveloped nations of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the West Indies. This study is devoted to an examination of the way in which the governments of Britain and France sought to ignore, stimulate, exploit, curtail, regulate, and otherwise respond to immigration and the racial conflict which ensued.

Immigrant Labor in Advanced Capitalism

Immigrant labor has come to be a critical ingredient in the health of the economies of the advanced industrial West. In the aftermath of the Second World War, foreign workers provided the hands that were essential to ensure the recovery of European economies. As the years passed, migrant labor became not merely a temporary convenience or necessity, but a structural requirement of advanced capitalism. It was not simply that in the absence of foreigners work would be left undone and vacancies unfilled. Immigration also helped dampen inflation, reduce wage pressure, relieve Europeans of the necessity of performing undesirable work tasks, and in general defuse class conflict. Even in recessionary periods, European economies could scarcely afford to divest themselves of significant portions of their alien work force. Exactly why migrant labor has become a more or less permanent feature of capitalist systems is a matter of some dispute which will be considered in due course. That it has become so is generally conceded.

The governments of Western Europe have seemed to realize fully their dependence on foreign labor at the very moment they discovered the considerable disadvantages attached to its use. These were largely social at first, but as time passed they became monetary as well. The structural dependence of economies on migrant workers becomes a dangerous condition if, for whatever reasons, migrants are not freely available. This situation may occur either because reservoirs of potential migrants begin to dry up or domestic political pressures prevent easy recourse to them. The latter is a distinct possibility because labor migration as it is known in Europe involves introducing racially and culturally mixed populations into societies which were formerly relatively homogeneous. This has everywhere resulted in interracial tension and in some places open violence. The maintenance of racial peace is essential, if for no other reason than without it the use of foreign workers will need to be seriously curtailed.

Migrant workers are profitable and beneficial to the host society only so long as they are unorganized, insecure, bereft of political rights, in a word, "exploited." Migrants constitute an industrial reserve army and it is characteristic of such an army that its members be highly mobile, dispensable, and poorly compensated. If any or most of these traits are removed, the attraction of immigration to the industrialist or planner is markedly reduced. Despite governmental indifference to the social deprivation of immigrants and heavy-handed attempts to snuff out incipient trade union or political organization among them, it has proved impossible to avoid at least some concessions to immigrant welfare and political status. Either the development of a political consciousness among migrants or their integration into national working-class organizations spells the end of many of the benefits of alien labor.

The story of contemporary immigration policy in Western Europe is that of a steady, if not always conscious, effort on the part of governments to resolve the tensions inherent in the uses and costs of migrant labor. As such, immigration is a compelling case study of the more general attempts of liberal democratic governments to deal with the mounting problems which they face.

Crisis, Change, and Public Policy

There is a growing consensus that the societies of the capitalist West are in a period of crisis which has the potential to transform their governments fundamentally. Observers from both the left and right increasingly agree that something is seriously awry in these polities. Surely few would any longer publicly entertain the sunny observations of eminent social scientists who only a few years ago concluded that the basic problems of capitalism had been resolved by the juxtaposition of economic plenty, welfare state benevolence, and mass political apathy. In the most fully developed framework for the study of the crisis tendencies of late capitalism, Jurgen Habermas illustrates the range of problems with which governments must wrestle. He identifies four major elements of the general malaise of capitalist political systems: crises of the economy, of the motivational system, of rationality, and of legitimacy.

For a while it had seemed that the governments of the West had discovered the means to manage their economic affairs skillfully and successfully. The introduction of Keynesian macroeconomic techniques, the development of planning on the French model, the willingness of both labor and management to compromise for the good of the productive system as a whole — each of these had contributed to steady growth and unparalleled prosperity in the thirty years since the war. If there were still problems, most seemed to think, they were the result of failures of will, not the absence of the intellectual tools with which progress could be assured. The dramatic reverses which European and American economic fortunes have suffered in recent months, the dogged persistence of inflation in the company of recession and high unemployment, have sent many theorists back to the drawing boards. A series of stop-gap measures and miracle cures have been prescribed, but none has promised to restore the confidence of decision makers in their ability to tame the market.

The increasing intractability of economic problems has been accompanied by a striking upsurge in the scope and intensity of demands being placed on the political system. Students and governments talk more and more of the expectations of citizens outrunning the ability of governments to meet them. "Demand overload" has been added to the vocabulary of policy analysis and there is concern that the political system might actually be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the requests made of it. Some see this as the outcome of the unbridled appetites of the mass public. Speaking of the development in the United States of a "democratic distemper," Samuel Huntington concludes that it is an excess of democracy that has Jed citizens to expect too much from their governments. He warns that "the vulnerability of democratic government in the United States thus comes from ... the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society." Writing in a similar vein about the United Kingdom, Samuel Brittan gloomily concludes that "liberal democracy suffers from internal contradictions, which are likely to increase in time, and that, on present indications, the system is likely to pass away within the life time of people now adult."

Marxists, on the other hand, interpret the inability of governments to fulfill their citizens' expectations as the logical outgrowth of the contradictions of advanced capitalism. The most significant manifestation of these contradictions is a permanent fiscal crisis. James O'Connor defines the fiscal crisis as the "structural gap ... between state expenditures and state revenues" and explains its appearance as the consequence of the contradiction between the tendency of governments in capitalist societies to take on more and more of the costs of production but to allow the private appropriation of the profits of the system. In O'Connor's scheme, the government is not simply at the mercy of an overindulgent mass public, but rather is bending under the weight of a complex and interlocking set of spontaneous and induced demands from both mass and elite sectors.

Difficult as these problems are, governments might have hoped to stumble along, reacting to each new challenge in an ad hoc fashion, buying time until some more comprehensive plan could be developed or until some technological fix burst on the scene. But this is impossible because the citizens of the Western democracies are in no mood to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. There is abundant evidence that there has been a remarkable decline in the trust and faith the average man and woman have in their government. That is, the legitimacy which politicians have in the past been able to fall back on in times of trouble has begun to evaporate. This seems to be the outcome of several concurrent trends. Writing about the United States, Huntington stresses the role of the "basic American value system and the degree of commitment which groups in society feel toward that value system." He describes the decline of governmental authority in the late sixties as part of a "creedal passion period" which, he believes, occurs in cyclical fashion in this country. Habermas, in contrast, focuses on the basic dilemma of justifying policies in universalistic terms when they are increasingly seen to benefit identifiable private interests. He goes on to point out that as the interventionist state moves into areas which were formerly part of the private sphere it demystifies these areas and makes the noninevitability of particular policy choices more apparent.

It is hardly surprising that these developments have resulted in a "rationality crisis" in which governments exhibit a profound inability to accomplish their goals, to take decisive action, to solve basic problems. Nevertheless, this is more than a little ironic, as Bertram Gross has noted:

Thus, at the very time when there is more sophisticated, long-range, resource-backed planning than ever before in human history, there appears to be a widely prevalent and growing sense of drift, disorder, and breakdown of societal guidance.

The remedy one is likely to offer for this problem depends, of course, on his explanation for it. Some critics have concluded that we have reached the limits of man's ability to cope with complexity and interdependence in the social world. They argue that to proceed along present lines is likely to exacerbate rather than reduce our difficulties. They counsel pulling back, reducing expectations, and settling for a less than perfect world. Others largely agree but believe that there is evidence of the impending collapse of the system as we know it and that simply "lowering one's voice" will not in the end be of much use. They are concerned, therefore, either with finding measures which can shore up the shaky edifice of Western, liberal democracy or with discovering the critical levers which will be able to move this system along the most congenial path toward the postindustrial future.

Immigration has been relevant to each of the crises Habermas outlines. Migrant workers have seemed to some decision makers, at least, to be an appealing means of overcoming labor shortage and inflation without generating politically unacceptable unemployment. Migrant workers, both because of the wealth they create and because they take over the least pleasant tasks of an industrial society, have abetted Europeans in their quest for higher and higher living standards. To 'the extent that these material advances were accompanied with insufficient awareness of their tenuous character and their dependence on the presence of foreigners, migration has exacerbated the motivation crisis in the West. Although chapter 4 will argue that government handling of immigration has intensified legitimation problems, at least in Britain, it has certainly been intended as a means of increasing the legitimacy of regimes by reducing the economic hardships of indigenous workers and by providing a target for working-class resentment within the working class itself. Finally, as the pages which follow will document, governmental responses to migration — harnessing it to labor market requirements, dealing with the social and cultural fallout in its wake — have amply illustrated the great difficulty of fashioning a working policy with respect to a complex and interdependent set of problems.

The immigrant labor-race issue is a compelling subject for the student of elite adaptation and crisis management. In its present form, the migrant worker problem is almost entirely a post-World War II phenomenon. As such it allows researchers to trace the reaction of decision makers to new and perplexing challenges. Moreover, immigration and racial turmoil are more than "policy problems" or dilemmas for weary and overtaxed politicians. In a real sense they represent potent tools for the avoidance of crisis and the amelioration of other, more pressing, troubles. This dual quality of labor migration which makes it both a cause of and an answer to the crises of advanced societies makes a simple, straightforward analysis of policy impossible and explains, perhaps, the fumbling manner in which it has been handled by British and French officials. It seems reasonable that it is with respect to emerging issues that decision makers have the greatest impact. They can play a major role in shaping the form and subsequent development of problems which have not been rigidly institutionalized. Before moving to a detailed description of the subject of this study, it is necessary to lay out a framework for the analysis of elite behavior and attitudes.

Elites and Public Policy

The intensity of the renewed interest among political scientists in public policy is matched by the heterogeneity of approaches to its analysis. Especially for those in the field of comparative politics, the imperative to transcend the limits of the traditional case study has led to a flowering of multi-national aggregate studies based on the quantification of a relatively few variables. Although we do not have so many good case studies that we can ignore that avenue of research, and though the potential of aggregate analysis is grand, but unrealized, there is still room for a middle-range approach at this juncture. Such an approach would attempt to strike a balance between the thin but ambitious work of aggregate data analyses and the contextually rich, but generalization poor, configurational studies.

What I propose is for the most part neither new nor unconventional, but in one respect it does go against the grain of much work in policy analysis and, indeed, behavioral political science. It does so by taking political actors seriously as policy makers, by focusing not only on their behavior, but on their motives, values, and perceptions. There is a tendency in recent work to treat political actors as objects, tugged to and fro by "forces" in their environments which are thought to explain their behavior. There is a reluctance to take anything policy-making elites say at face value, or even as informative, certainly not as the reason for their actions. This is an error, I think, because it obscures the degree to which elites do make choices which affect the course of political development. It also causes us to forget that the language and arguments which policy makers use can be a fruitful source of data on their information, perceptions, and values. If, as the previous section has suggested, contemporary capitalist societies are in transitional phases in which the paradigms that policy makers employ are no longer adequate to handle the challenges they face, an inquiry into the content of those paradigms and the manner in which they evolve or fail to evolve is critical.

One approach to the elucidation of elite perceptions which shows great promise is the careful analysis of individual actors through interviews. Putnam's ground-breaking work on elite ideology and Axelrod's contribution to the mapping of elite attitude structures are among the best efforts using these techniques. It is not clear, however, that this is the most compelling approach for persons interested primarily in public policy rather than individual, or even group, behavior. At least, it seems reasonable to me to embark on the study of a relatively new and unexplored arena in the field of comparative policy analysis in rather broad terms. Instead of attempting to probe in detail the motivations, values, and biases of individual policy makers through in-depth interviews, on or off the record, I wish to describe and analyze the conversation among elites which has taken place in public over the immigrant/race problem. In doing this, I carry out the analysis at two levels.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies by Gary P. Freeman. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Tables, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• CHAPTER 1. Introduction, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 2. Labor Migration and the Colonial Legacy, pg. 20
• CHAPTER 3. The Evolution of Immigration Policy since World War II, pg. 43
• CHAPTER 4. Elites, Consensus, and the Depoliticization of Race, pg. 99
• CHAPTER 5. Immigration, Race Relations, and Welfare, pg. 131
• CHAPTER 6. The Economic Context of Immigration Policy, pg. 173
• CHAPTER 7. The Dilemma of Organized Labor and the Left, pg. 216
• CHAPTER 8. Racism, Nationalism, and the Mass Public, pg. 259
• CHAPTER 9. Conclusion, pg. 308
• Works Cited, pg. 330
• Index, pg. 349