"This article assesses the historical trajectory of legal and political campaigns to regulate the flow of newcomers to France. A republican-nationalist consensus against cultural expressions of ethnicity or difference has progressed in unison with the devastation of the urban and industrial landscape that characterized postwar French society for three decades. The stigmatization of African and Southwest Asian immigrants is often cast in a neocolonial rhetoric of integration or assimilation; the historical defense of France's civilizing mission, and its reified national past, are employed as exclusionary, racialized representations of "barbarians at the gates." It is argued here that the political economy of immigration in recent decades belies the assumptions upon which such views rest. The growing resistance of youths in the banlieues (working-class suburbs) and sans-papiers (undocumented foreigners) illustrates that nativism, xenophobia, and their underlying economic rationalizations, while hegemonic, have not gone unchallenged."

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