A few weeks ago the historian Perry Anderson published an essay “Regime Change in the West?” in the London Review of Books. Like many of Anderson’s essays this is a wide-ranging splurge full of bon mots and *apercus” delivered from some quasi-Olympian height. My attention was caught, though, by the following couple of sentences which both expressed a widely-held belief, even a cliché, but one which I knew to be false despite the lazy “of course” which Anderson interjects:
Historically too, of course, the US is an immigrant society, as no European country has ever been [emphasis added]. That means there is a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity for newcomers that doesn’t exist at anything like the same emotional pitch in Europe.
The reason I knew this to be false is that, unlike Anderson, I had taken the trouble in my own (non-historical) work on immigration to read the work of France’s foremost historian of the phenomenon, Gérard Noiriel in his now-classic work, Le creuset francais: histoire de l’immigration (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Seuil, 1988). In his opening chapter “The dismissal of memory”, Noiriel addresses both the facts and the myth, pointing out that while in the US immigration is understood as an “internal” part of the constitutive history of the nation, in France it has been treated as something episodic and external. But when you look at the facts, immigration has played as much of a role, and perhaps more, in French society as American.
Here’s Noiriel
… American mythology has always tended to inflate the importance of immigration in the history of the country. [But] even during those periods when the influx was at its greatest, “the population of recent immigrants never exceeded 15% of the population”. … However, the key point is that in the United States immigration underwent a big slowdown at the beginning of the 1920s after very restrictive laws were passed, whilst in France this is the period when it begins to take on its full extent. In 1930, France is the country which experiences the largest rate of growth of a foreign population in the world (515 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 492 for the United States). At the end of the 1960s France is once more in the forefront of industrialised countries for the relative size of its immigrant population. We can therefore affirm that contrary to widely held assumptions, for at least half a century, the question of immigration has had an importance, as much economic as social or political, that is greater for France than the United States. If we look at things from a genealogical perspective, over three generations, the lived memory of the “immigrant experience” it today more widely spread in the French population than in the American one. … If we start from the “foreign born” category used by the US Administration and compare it with an equivalent group for France, we find that in 1970, Americans of recent foreign origin constitute less than 5% of the total population as against 12 to 13% for France in the 1975 census. This gap shows above all how much more significant a role immigrants of the “first generation” play in French society compared to the US. However, other figures show that in 1970 already, the place of the “second generation” was proportionately as important in each of the two countries. At that date, indeed, 11.8% of Americans born in the US had at least one parent of foreign origin. This was the case for close to 10% of French citizens, according to the survey carried out by Alain Girard, a survey that was only concerned with adults (including children would have raised the proportion considerably)…. [W]e can therefore consider as plausible the idea that today, over three generations, the impact of immigration is at least as great in France as is in the United States. (Le creuset francais (2006 edition), pp. 20-21, my translation)
One of the misconceptions about France that Noiriel is concerned to expose is of an autonomous and auchtochtonous society dating back centuries and refounded with the revolution but where “the story” is always about internal development engagement with outsiders is a matter of war or conquest. It was never like that. There have always been foreigners and in largish numbers (although the idea of who counts as “foreign” is a mutable one). Anderson and Noiriel would agree that immigration is much more central to the self-conception of the United States than of France but the job of the historian is surely to expose the vain self-conceptions of nations and their elites rather than flattering them with an lazy “of course”. But then Anderson’s main purpose isn’t so much to flatter Americans as to suggest that European anti-migrant hostility is understandable because Europeans have never had to experience high levels of immigration before. But they have.
{ 54 comments }
oldster 05.12.25 at 3:20 pm
Super interesting, and a correction to my prior beliefs.
What was the country of origin for these new immigrants to France, and how did that change during different decades?
Chris Bertram 05.12.25 at 3:29 pm
Well, if you look at French surnames you’ll see a lot of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and of course there have been many from north Africa in the past sixty years. In the inter-war years French had a big shortage of able-bodied workers because of WW1 and that was also a period when the redrawing of boundaries further east and the Russian revolution had people on the move. One thing some people think is that these migrants would have been more acceptable to the existing population because “white”, but other work by Noiriel that I encountered via a recent podcast shows this wasn’t the case: there was a horrible anti-Italian pogrom at Aigues-Mortes in 1893.
oldster 05.12.25 at 3:35 pm
Thanks, Chris.
Tm 05.12.25 at 4:32 pm
Switzerland is another country with very significant immigration communities going back to the 19th century. Like in other parts of Europe, most of the 19th century was characterized by large emigration waves to the Americas, but industrialization and railway works also brought large numbers of immigrants, mostly Italian, and around WWI, Swiss cities were very cosmopolitan. Xenophobic riots also were a big issue. Immigration slowed down in the interwar period but continued at even higher rates after the war.
Currently almost a third of the population was born abroad. And this isn’t a recent development, the proportion has been high for decades.
It’s true that this is hardly reflected in the self-image of official Switzerland but it’s a fact nevertheless.
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerung/migration-integration/nach-geburtsort.html, https://www.swissstats.bfs.admin.ch/data/webviewer/appId/ch.admin.bfs.swissstat/article/issue201420152000-05/package
Tm 05.12.25 at 4:39 pm
A big difference however between the US and any European country is that probably more than 90% of the population are descended from relatively recent (200 years) immigrants and many are conscious of this fact (but apparently less so today in the Trump era), whereas in Europe, typically, most people think that “they” (their ancestors) have owned “their country” forever. (As an aside, most European states are younger than the US but that doesn’t prevent people from adopting these national myths).
Chris Bertram 05.12.25 at 4:54 pm
@Tm, well it is true that most of the population of the US is composed of people descended from people who moved to North America after 1492. I could probably find some more answers digging around in Noiriel, but for now just ask yourself what proportion of the population of France has, say, at least one grandparent born outside the current national territory (and repeat for great-grandparents etc). Of course there are troubling questions of definition, given that “immigrant” is not a stable natural kind, but most people who do the thought experiment are going to conclude (I think) that almost everyone has immigrant ancestry.
Peter Dorman 05.12.25 at 7:32 pm
I think this post takes us into the longstanding debate over the relevance of the ethnic vs civic nationalism distinction. FWIW, I think the distinction is useful but blurred in practice. Obviously being from a favored home country or ethnicity endows a migrant to the US with certain “civic” virtues; this is explicit in much right-wing theorizing. Translate Trump’s “shithole” countries into respectable academic garb, and you have continuity. Similarly, the absence of supposedly shared values is what marks MENA immigrants to Europe, right? In other words, immigration isn’t a homogeneous marker in national politics on either side of the pond, in the sense that simple aggregate counts might measure.
An interesting case in point is Germany, where a large portion of the population (don’t know the exact number) consists of descendants of people who fled E Europe at the end of WWII. They are “ethnic Germans” despite having been Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, whatever. You could say this was about language, but given the ability of second generation immigrants to speak the common language fluently, I doubt that’s the whole story.
So the fact that France became home for millions of southern and eastern Europeans (and pieds-noirs) makes them a high-immigration country in an objective sense, but the cultural politics may vary.
Ebenezer Scrooge 05.12.25 at 9:51 pm
The US is beginning to resemble Europe in another related respect. The French national mythos was that everybody in France was descended from Asterix, even if they had a surname like “Sarkozy.” The American mythos was far more receptive to the coexistence of ethnicity and citizenship: E Pluribus Unum. But I think the two regions are converging. In America, the (mutable) characteristic of “white” is beginning to blur some old ethnic distinctions. In Europe, the recent immigrants are insisting on (or forced into) ethnicity.
Ymmv, but throwing this out.
Tm 05.12.25 at 10:00 pm
CB, I said that many Europeans „think“ that their ancestors are rooted in “their country” forever, which isn’t really true but it’s probably a little more plausible in Europe (especially Western Europe) than in the US. In reality there has always been migration, in different directions, voluntary and forced (the huge movements of people at the end of the war, mostly due to ethnic cleansing, are hardly present in the public consciousness), and ethnic and national identities are based more on myth than reality.
Chris Bertram 05.13.25 at 7:57 am
@Peter Dorman, yes, so there’s certainly an issue about how easy it is in different places for populations of immigrant origin to become widely coded as native as Italian immigrants clearly weren’t in 1893 but their descendants had become by 2025. France is supposed to be a country of civic rather than ethnic nationalism but French citizens of North African origin may find it easier to get perceived as “French” abroad than they are in France (cf Amélie Le Renard’s, Western Privilege). Skin colour and religion are harder things to memory-hole than the fact that someone has a foreign-sounding name, so racism is a big part of the story of why some groups get accepted and others don’t. Of course Perry Anderson might be more relectant to provide excuses for Europeans complaining about the presence of black and brown people whereas “immigrants”, confusing multiple categories and histories as it does, allows plausible deniability both to bigots and those seeking to render bigotry unfortunate but somehow understandable.
J-D 05.13.25 at 11:47 am
There’s a Wikipedia page which has a list of countries by immigrant population–that is, how much of the population was born in a different country. I’m in no position to evaluate the reliability or usefulness of the data, but for what it’s worth, among other things it tells me this:
31.1% Switzerland
30.4% Australia
28.2% New Zealand
25.5% Austria
23.1% Ireland
23.0% Canada
21.4% Sweden
20.0% Belgium
19.8% Germany
18.5% Spain
18.2% Norway
17.1% United Kingdom
16.2% Netherlands
15.2% United States of America
Chris Bertram 05.13.25 at 11:57 am
Thanks @JD
The page is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population
Two points:
1. it isn’t all that relevant to the historical dispute in the OP.
2. Note the “Definition” section which highlights the fact that radically different definitions of immigrant are employed in the data. Boris Johnson counts as an immigrant, but in some other countries someone like him would not. In cases where the national territory has changed you get the weird phenomenom where people become statistical “immigrants” without ever moving. Many other such effects.
Jamie Draper 05.13.25 at 4:44 pm
Perry Anderson’s analysis of immigration is consistently facile and often plainly at odds with the facts. This is not only true of his account of the immigration histories of the societies that he discusses, but also – as China Miéville points out (LRB, 17 April) – of his uncritical acceptance of received myths about the labour market effects of immigration. Immigration certainly does impact wages and employment, but the best available evidence suggets that when immigration does have negative effects on wages and employment (which it often does not), those effects are typically modest, localised, and primarily affect previous cohorts of immigrants. As Miéville points out, those on the left would do well to recognise popular narratives that attribute national decline to immigrants “taking jobs” from “native workers” for what they are – specious ideological claims that serve to redirect attention away from deeper causes of wage stagnation such as austerity, financialistion, and the flexibilisation of labour. Miéville is right to point out that Anderson “takes the framing of the ‘problem of immigration’ as a starting point. Which is either to tail the right, or to accept its propoganda”. An important point for those on the British left to keep in mind, in light of Keir Starmer’s rather transparent recent attempt to court Reform voters.
Grumpy Old Railroader 05.13.25 at 5:23 pm
Lawd almighty. He perhaps should look up the origins of “Franks” in Wikipedia. Most historians realize that every place in the world has always been populated and then repopulated by migrations of peoples into other areas and the French are just the distant migrants who flowed into western Europe
J-D 05.14.25 at 12:30 am
I am finding these remarks difficult to interpret. Is it possible that it’s being suggested that the description of people as ethnic Germans is rendered dubious by the fact that they came to Germany from places such as Poland, Ukraine and Hungary? If it is, that suggestion is not accurate.
CHETAN R MURTHY 05.14.25 at 12:33 am
ChrisB @ 6: “what proportion of the population of France has, say, at least one grandparent born outside the current national territory”
I remember in the early 90s, learning that the proportion was a -quarter-. It was a celebrated fact in France at the time. No idea if it’s bigger today, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
dk 05.14.25 at 12:44 am
Today I learned. Thank you!
MisterMr 05.14.25 at 5:39 am
Hey, Vatican City has a 100% immigration rate!
(this is irrelevant, but funny relative to an older post about popes and philosophers).
John Q 05.14.25 at 5:57 am
Australia is right at the top of the list, with Switzerland. That hasn’t stopped us treating refugees appallingly, or a more recent panic about international students pushing up housing prices.
But despite this, there is indeed “a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity “, with strong support for citizenship by birth or naturalisation as the criterion for Australian-ness.
And the votes of a large ethnic Chinese population has punished China hawks who have mostly not been careful about the distinctions between the CCP, China (as an allegedly expansionist nation) and Chinese people in general.
Chris Bertram 05.14.25 at 7:17 am
@J-D many complexities in the German case, arising from their nationality laws and history. Clearly many people who lived (until 1918 or 1945) on the territories of the former German state were also ethnically German. Ditto various groups living on the former territory of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I think the poster probably has in mind the contrast between the treatment of the descendants of Volga Germans by the German state after the end of the Soviet Union and their treatment of the descendants of Gastarbeiter from Turkey and Yugoslavia: you had a group who were thoroughly Russified, often with little grasp of German, who were entitled to citizenship and another group who were full social and linguistic members of the community but who were denied political membership.
Lameen 05.14.25 at 7:30 am
Taking national borders for granted distorts the picture in much the same way as taking ethnicity for granted does, I think. There is something warped about a definition of immigration that includes moving from Milan to Marseille but excludes moving from Kansas City to Los Angeles. Among other things, such a definition (conveniently for nativists) sweeps under the carpet the massive rural-to-urban migration that created cities like Paris or London in the first place.
J-D 05.14.25 at 9:40 am
Your guess at what Peter Dorman meant could easily be correct, but it’s still a guess. What you’re now telling me I accept, and if Peter Dorman had told me the same in as many words I would have accepted that. All I’m still saying is that the fact that Gastarbeiter and their descendants were badly and unfairly treated, and the further fact that this first fact is thrown into stark relief by the contrast with the more favourable treatment of Volga Germans, don’t justify suggesting that Volga Germans aren’t or weren’t ethnically German: which, maybe, is not something Peter Dorman was suggesting in the first place, but, to return to my original point, I found Peter Dorman’s remarks difficult to interpret. In contrast, I find yours straightforward to understand, for which I am grateful.
MisterMr 05.14.25 at 12:09 pm
@Lameen 21
But the guy who moves from Milano to Marseille has to learn a new language, the one who moves from Kansas City to Los Angeles doesn’t.
Also locals are more likely to treat the guy from Milan as a “foreigner” (and this is way more accentuated for people from, e.g., Morocco).
The problem is that these things about cultural ethnicity are really vague and ambiguous, and depend often on cultural fashions (e.g. maybe yesterday Italians are perceived as “very foreign” by the French but tomorrow both will just perceive each other as “Europeans”, and speak fluently in English or other common language).
Chris Bertram 05.14.25 at 4:06 pm
I guess I agree that we need to take account of intra-state migration qua migration too. Changing languages doesn’t really make a distinction, since the guy who moves from Zurich to Geneva or from Liege to Antwerp also needs to learn a new language. Also, the rural to urban migration that created cities like Paris would often have included linguistic shifts both from non-standard regional dialects of French and from non-French languages (Alsatian, Breton, Occitan, Catalan, Basque … ) even within the borders of France.
Peter Dorman 05.14.25 at 5:30 pm
Response to J-D: I guess I have to expand a bit to be clearer. The overall percentages of foreign-born settle the issue only if the issue is defined in a way that treats all immigrants the same. But obviously some are viewed by their target countries as more “of the people” than others. The politics of this distinction depend to at least some extent on whether the countries in question are classified as ethnic vs civic nationalist. Under ethnic nationalism there are two types of immigrants, those who share the dominant ethnicity and those who don’t. Under civic nationalism the distinction is between immigrants who share the dominant norms and values and those who don’t. Thus, the US has been interpreted as being a more successful melting pot due to its civic nationalist status.
But we know that isn’t even close to the whole story. First, ethnic boundaries are fluid, and in practice they are influenced by perceptions of shared norms and practices. Thus the boundaries between ethnic French and, say, Catalans, NW Italians and pieds-noirs are blurred, and then it’s not a huge step toward thinking Spaniards or Italians in general are “OK”. Second, the claim of shared values is often a rather obvious cover for ethnic bias or racism. Chinese exclusion in the US was ostensibly justified because Chinese practices were different (and mysterious), but today we see racism at work.
Second, immigrants get assimilated, or at least they can under the right conditions, and second or third generations often have the attributes, especially language, that supposedly underlie the distinctions behind who should be admitted and who not. There is a raft of sociological studies that show that children and grandchildren of immigrants from Mexico to the US are “hyper-American” in social and work attitudes, so discrimination against them has nothing to do with civic-y shibboleths.
And one could go on. My rumination began with the perception that, when trying to understand a country’s culture and politics, immigrants are not all equal, and so the aggregate percentages of foreign born are only a starting point.
engels 05.14.25 at 7:26 pm
There was a great article a few years ago in the NLR (not by the notorious PA) arguing (I’m paraphrasing rather crudely) that professional class types never really travel anywhere anymore because they live in a shadow world of “global” cities, airport lounges and generic upscale hotels and restaurants where everybody speaks English and which are all essentially the same. Will try to find it.
Jon Weinberg 05.14.25 at 11:37 pm
The quote from Noiriel understates the role of immigration in the U.S., because it foregrounds the effects of the 40-year period (between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Immigration Act of 1965) when immigration to the U.S. was at its lowest. Yes, only 5% of the U.S. population was foreign-born in 1970, but 1970 was the lowest that measure got in all of U.S. history; the same figure reached 15% in early 20C, and it’s just about 15% now. See, e.g., https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time. The comparable figure for France now appears to be about 10%, and on a quick look I can’t find anything backing up Noiriel’s statement that it was 12-13% in 1975. See, e.g., https://www.statista.com/statistics/947474/immigrant-population-in-france/ (7-8%).
Tm 05.15.25 at 7:30 am
“Clearly many people who lived (until 1918 or 1945) on the territories of the former German state were also ethnically German.”
Not to forget the ethnic Germans who fled/were displaced from Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1945. They were never Germans politically (except 1938-1945) but were accepted into post war Germany as German citizens.
The web (https://www.blz.bayern.de/die-eingliederung-der-vertriebenen-in-bayern.html) tells me 1.9 million refugees from the East (“Ostvertriebene”) were integrated into Bavaria alone after 1945, which amounts to about one quarter of the pre war population. These were German speakers but they were culturally and historically quite distinct from the host population. They were definitely immigrants and the integration of such a large number of immigrants (dwarfing anything that happened later – e. g. 1 million Syrian refugees in 2015 amounts to 1.2% of the population) into a ruined country was a huge and contentious effort – by no means everybody welcomed the refugees with open arms – but ultimately successful.
It’s a part of German history that nobody talks about today but it could put our present day obsession with relatively small numbers of refugees into perspective.
Tm 05.15.25 at 7:40 am
engels: “professional class types never really travel anywhere anymore because they live in a shadow world of “global” cities, airport lounges and generic upscale hotels and restaurants where everybody speaks English and which are all essentially the same”
This sounds like something Thomas Friedman could have written.
I don’t know how “professional class” types travel but if they spend their precious vacation time in airport lounges and so on, they are truly deplorable. I suspect if they are American, they don’t have much time to travel (other than “business”), as “busy” as they are.
Tm 05.15.25 at 8:50 am
Further to 28, I think it’s important ot understand that what happened was that the government, or the authorities, decided that the immigrants/refugees were Germans and to be treated as equal citizens, provided with accomodation and food just like the natives. And this made it easier to integrate them despite very difficult conditions. This kind of thing doesn’t happen just by itself, through spontaneous solidarity with fellow ethnic Germans in need, it requires explicit policy. It’s not a given, consider the treatment of Palestinian refugees in various Arab states.
Similar population movements happend in parts of Eastern Europe (especially Poland), as already happened after WWI. Europe is very much a product of migration, voluntary and forced, much of it quite recent, but Europeans mostly prefer to ignore this history.
engels 05.15.25 at 12:03 pm
This sounds like something Thomas Friedman could have written.
Er ok. Are any NYT commissioning editors reading?
As I said I didn’t really do it justice but it’s recent to the internal migration discussion: ie. it’s further from Canary Wharf to Poplar than it is to Wall Street.
Combined and uneven space-time compression.
Chris Bertram 05.15.25 at 4:21 pm
@Jon Weinberg: Noiriel bases his 12-13 figure on the French census of 1975. I don’t know where Statista get their numbers from, since they only disclose their source to subscribers. Immigration numbers are always somewhat uncertain, both because of the difficulty of counting people who have entered by irregular means but also because of problems of definition. Anyway, I’m inclined to trust Noiriel on the facts, given the general quality of his book (and other work). In any case, the point of the OP was not to assert the positive claim that France somehow exceeded the US but rather to deny Anderson’s negative claim about any European country, as quoted.
Peter Dorman 05.15.25 at 6:50 pm
A postscript: the movie Entre les murs from 2008. Enlighted, modern France wants to believe it has exchanged ethnic for civil nationalism, but it’s not so easy. There’s a lot to talk about in this film.
Tom Perry 05.15.25 at 9:23 pm
Someone’s gotta speak up for lazy self-mythologizing:
1: What happened after 1920 in Europe wasn’t so much immigration as churn, and it’s the same churn that’s been there since the dawn of civilization. Movement of displaced populations in the immediate aftermath of the Great War wasn’t institutionalized in Europe the way it was in America. We have Ellis Island, a self-mythologizing icon of immigration. At Ellis, the process began by which immigrants’ former national identities were elided. Millions were processed through the same facility, to become not this-that-or-the-other Europeans but Americans.
As a percentage, migration into France was steeper after the war than migration into America. But migrants to America were more committed: they could never just walk back to the places they came from. Part of the myth is the distance and the water of the Atlantic, both of which are things that really exist.
In terms of sheer numbers, migration into America had to be far greater than migration into France. There were more, many millions more, who gave everything to start anew in America. The “immigrant” self-identification persists because so many of those people are still in memory.
I believe that things like families, clans, tribes, and nations are part of the evolved nature of humanity. Nations have a need and a right to self-mythologize, to self-identify by some narrative or other. No serious person gives a damn whether the narratives are true. We can get by on Romulus and Remus if we have to.
Thanks for the perspective on postwar migration in Europe. Of course large-scale migration after the war was inevitable if you think about it. But histories mostly talk about great deeds done in the name of nation and country, less about the legions of little people trying to scurry out of the way.
Daniel K 05.15.25 at 10:20 pm
My father home town was in Russia when he was born, in Poland when he grew up and is in Belarus now. He once told me it was once in Lithuania for three days. In as much as he had a nationality when he lived there, it was Jew, as it would have been in the Soviet Union
For many years all the school children in Paris, Hanoi, Dakar, etc. were taught “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois.”
In the U.S. Catholics were considered foreign. Now 6 of 9 Supreme court justices are Catholic.
LFC 05.16.25 at 2:51 am
Beyond or apart from the details of immigration percentages, France and the U.S. seem to have shared some similarities in this sphere, at least until recently. And Noiriel’s use of the word creuset (which translates as “melting pot” or “crucible”) suggests that he might agree on this point (though I defer to those like CB who have read him).
These similarities, it could be argued, have to do with the dominant ideologies and self-images of their respective societies held, at least until recently, by most national elites in the two countries, views that treat culture and language as engines of assimilation and grantors — in theory, if not always in practice — of full membership in the polity, and in the French case, in the broader community of those who speak/write French in their daily lives. There are also some legal similarities (e.g., jus soli a/k/a birthright citizenship, though that is currently under assault by the Trump administration).
Chris Bertram 05.16.25 at 7:44 am
@LFC, the basic form of citizenship transmission in France is jus sanguinis to which various jus soli elements have been added over the years.
MisterMr 05.16.25 at 11:28 am
@Chris Bertram 24
“Changing languages doesn’t really make a distinction”
We are speaking of migration, and the legality/acceptability of it.
Although people can move to more or less distant places during their lives, the problem for migration arises when these people go where they are perceived as “outgroups”, a perception that is based on cultural stereotypes (so for example a southern italian in northern Italy was manybe an outgroup 60 years ago, maybe an ingroup today).
It is true that these differnce are fluid so in some countries there are different spoken languages, in other cases the same language is spoken agross many countries, there might be cultural variants, in some cases the differnce might be religion etc..
All these definition are very fluid and may vary from person to person: ethnicity is not really a thing, more lice a perception based on placing arbitrary limits on a continuum.
However “language” is one of the natural cultural markers that are recognized by children before they even start to speak (read this recently in a book by Paul Bloom), so I think it is a rather big difference. Local variants of a language are too but the difference will generally be smaller. Religion, dress codes etc. will be other differences.
In a better world this tendency to perceive people as outgroup should not exist, but then if this was the case we wouldn’t worry about migration so ignoring this is like ignoring most of the problem.
OTOH, although there might be different ethnic groups in the same country, they generally are not legally forbidden to migrate from one point to the other, so internal migration is generally less an issue than migration across borders (it’s arguable whether migration inside the EU counts as internal migration or not, but it certainly didn’t in 1970).
engels 05.16.25 at 11:56 am
Back on-topic isn’t the basic difference that US understands itself (in however distorted and self-glorifying way) as a settler-colonial state whereas European countries don’t?
engels 05.16.25 at 12:43 pm
Nouriel’s conclusion that “we can consider as plausible the claim that today, over three generations, the impact of immigration is at least as great in France as is in the United States” seems some way from refuting the commonly held idea (and not just by USians and Perry Anderson) that the US is an “immigrant society” in a way that European nations aren’t. Cultures, institutions and identities have longer and deeper roots than that and of course the overall trajectory of population growth throughout modernity is also relevant.
LFC 05.16.25 at 12:57 pm
CB @37,
The jus soli elements were significant enough to allow R. Brubaker to draw a France/Germany contrast in his Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. But it’s been a long time since I read it, have forgotten the details, and others have doubtless taken some issue with its arguments since it was published. (That’s at least half of what academics and other writers do, after all — disagree with each other.) So I must defer to your correction.
LFC 05.16.25 at 6:09 pm
engels @39
Back on-topic isn’t the basic difference that US understands itself (in however distorted and self-glorifying way) as a settler-colonial state whereas European countries don’t?
I think there is something to this. Both the left-of-center and the right-of-center in the U.S. take note of the history of westward expansion and “manifest destiny.” The Left sees it as at least partly a settler-colonial thing including the genocidal displacement of Native Americans and war of aggression vs. Mexico, whereas the Trumpists etc. see it as the glorious spread of the sturdy, self-reliant yeoman farmer or salt-of-the-earth frontiersman (or whatever), but they’re referring to the same process.
As Richard Slotkin has observed (in, e.g., A Great Disorder) the “myth of the frontier” as found, say, in Fenimore Cooper’s novels or the figure of Daniel Boone, contains a tension or contradiction because the hero, while fighting the Natives (or some of them), is also drawn to their “savage” way of life.
Jon Weinberg 05.16.25 at 10:04 pm
The US’s self-identification as an immigrant society is based on [1] the high, mostly wide-open immigration of the period that ended in 1924; and [2] the high levels of immigration — newly nonwhite, and much of it unauthorized — in recent decades. Both of those are/were real things. But [1] ended an entire century (!) ago, and half of the country hasn’t reconciled itself to [2]. So I don’t wanna be seen as defending Anderson here.
I have huge respect for Noiriel, and enthusiastically grant the problems of definition. But — without being in a position to check the 1975 French census — I really wonder about that 12-14% figure. Compare Odile Roubhan & Pierre Tanneau, Une situation des descendants d’immigrés plus favorable que celle des immigrés, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/6793314/IMMFRA23-VE.pdf (publication of France’s national statistics bureau, citing to French census data, stating that France’s immigrant population in 1968 was about 3.2 million, or 6.5%).
engels 05.17.25 at 10:44 am
Btw wasn’t Nation of Immigrants a 1950s book by JFK—so not really about the “three generations” or “recent decades” before today.
Jon Weinberg 05.18.25 at 2:57 pm
@Engels: JFK wrote Nation of Immigrants (largely written in 1958, published in 1964) as part of the successful push to repeal the Immigration Act of 1924 that culminated in the Immigration Act of 1965. He was drawing on the long U.S. history of unrestricted European immigration that had persisted into his lifetime. But it was an advocacy piece — the point of writing it was that, three decades plus after 1924, people needed to be reminded of that history. And while the U.S. rightly junked that 1924 regime, which had been put in place largely to stop the influx of Jews and Italians, it has never reinstated the open-borders (for Europeans) approach that prevailed before 1924.
Matt 05.18.25 at 9:56 pm
while the U.S. rightly junked that 1924 regime, which had been put in place largely to stop the influx of Jews and Italians, it has never reinstated the open-borders (for Europeans) approach that prevailed before 1924.
I don’t mean to pick on things here, but I think it’s worth being more careful on the history. It’s often said that the US had “open borders”, at least for some groups, before ’24 (or some other period – people pick different ones.) But, this isn’t really accurate. There were rules against vagrants and paupers; prostitutes; convicts; lunatics; idiots; those likely to be public charges; and people suffering from contagious or loathsome diseases that were regularly applied to people arriving at Ellis Island, for example, resulting in non-trivial numbers of people being sent back. Because ship owners had to bring people back who were rejected, they also made efforts to apply these restrictions befor transporting people, providing another layer of restriction. These rules sometimes resulted in some family members being admitted and others rejected, and there was no way to challenge this. So, the rules were different, but it’s misleading to say that there was “open borders”. It’s more accurate and useful to say that there were significantly more liberal immigration policies towards Europeans at the time.
As put, the statement is also potentially misleading in another way. Well into the 20th century, the US had very liberal immigration policies towards most of the western hemisphere (both north and south.) There were no per-country limits (such as those applied by the 1924 laws) for immigrants from the western hemisphere before the 1965 Immigration Act, only “qualitative” ones of the sort noted above. Migration from within the western hemisphere was fairly limited for many years, but this was because of reasons external to the immigration system (the great depression limited demand for workers, and made it harder for people to travel, as did WWII) rather than because of the law. Mirgration from the western hemisphere was actually treated much more liberally before 1965 than afterwards.
lurker 05.19.25 at 7:03 am
@Tm, 30, a boring data dump:
The majority of the post WW-II refugees to Germany from the east were people from the parts of Germany annexed by Poland and the USSR and they were literal German citizens and had been that ever since there was a united Germany to be a citizen of.
Sudeten Germans were the second largest group, they were also German citizens from 1938.
Another large group were Germans moved to occupied territories during the war, these were either German citizens or ethnic Germans who had been invited Heim ins Reich by the then German government and then used as colonists, hence reasonably a German responsibility.
German ex-Habsburg subjects who had found themselves citizens of Romania, Yugoslavia and Hungary through no choice of their own were not German citizens, but they were still obviously German, not Serb or whatever.
There was an earlier, more limited expulsion of Germans from lost territories in 1919-1920. France classified people living in Alsace and Lorraine whose parents or grandparents had been born in France before 1871 as automatically French and regarded non-German migrants (Poles and Italians) as harmless, so the majority was good to stay. But anyone too German had to go, and a quarter of the Alsatian population was subject to a selection process that determined whether they were now fellow citizens or aliens.
engels 05.19.25 at 10:00 am
I maintain being an “immigrant society” doesn’t have to be about recent policy (which is partly what Jon is saying I think). Almost everyone in USA is descended from people who immigrated* there since 1492, and that makes it completely different from France or anywhere else in Europe.
albeit often against their wishes, not to mention the wishes of the indigenous population (that wasn’t murdered)
Chris Bertram 05.19.25 at 12:13 pm
@engels, I’m pretty sure, the facts of human biology and kinship being what they are, that almost everyone in France is descended from someone who immigrated to France since 1492. In fact, it is quite possible (on the Charlemagne principle) that most people in France are descended from someone who immigrated to North America after 1492 (I note you say “there”, even though “there didn’t exist in until 1776). Also noting that the discussion isn’t about “recent policy” but about whether any European society ought to be thought of on the basis of its history as an immigrant society (whether or not that is what its public image represents it as). France doesn’t think of itself as an immigrant society, but that’s because it has memory-holed an important part of its own history, and notably, the history of the inter-war years.
engels 05.19.25 at 12:40 pm
Sorry just saw earlier comments like #6, which partly address this, but the difference between lots of people having some immigrant ancestry (France et ansi de suite) and almost everyone having nothing but (US) is salient to most people I think, whether they’re USians, Euros or Lazy Perry.
engels 05.19.25 at 12:58 pm
Sorry X’d posts. That almost everyone in France has some (post-1492) immigrant ancestry and (perhaps) almost everyone in US has some pre-1492 indigenous ancestry is interesting and thought-provoking if true (a bit like a calculation I did as a school kid that every breath I take contains some of the final gasp of Julius Caesar) but there is still an overwhelming difference in the size of this “some” in each case (and living individuals’ reasonable knowledge of it) which justifies the “immigrant society” category I think.
The historical information on this thread is interesting though and I shall think about it some more.
Jon Weinberg 05.19.25 at 3:28 pm
Matt @46 are in agreement on most of the facts, but differ on the characterization. It’s the case that the Immigration Act of 1882 purported to exclude “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself of herself without becoming a public charge,” and the 1891 Act added additional restrictions, including “persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease,” but those being the sole limitations is, I think, largely consistent with the “open borders” shorthand as leading scholars use it. See, e.g., Kevin Johnson’s seminal 2019 article “Open Borders?”, in which he writes, “[e]ven in a system of open entry, a certain level of border enforcement would be necessary to allow for the exclusion of noncitizens who endanger the public safety”; or you can see the same in the work of Joseph Carens.
Matt 05.20.25 at 12:52 am
Thanks for the reply, Jon. Immigration (both law and “theory”) is my main area of specialization, so I know Kevin Johnson’s and Joe Carens’ work well. But, I think this underestimates the number of excluded at those times, and also understates what many people think of when they call for open borders. One common claim is that travel between countries should be the same as travel between states within the US, but the restrictions above would not be allowed for travel between states in the US – some of them have been found to be unconstitutional, even. The “likely to be a public charge” rule, in particular, would rule out a very significant number of people at this point, if we interpret that to mean (as is usually done) “will make use of government benefits”, if access to such benefits would be available. So, I’ll stick with the claim that saying there was “open borders” before the 1920s in the US is misleading, and that at least some people who say they want “open borders” are not being clear or careful enough. This is unfortunate, as it makes good discussion on the topic harder.
(For what it’s worth, I think Carens is usually, but not always, pretty clear on this, and that Johnson’s work is less clear, though I have benefited from some of his other work, including his immigration law handbook.)
engels 05.20.25 at 9:09 am
The “likely to be a public charge” rule, in particular, would rule out a very significant number of people at this point, if we interpret that to mean (as is usually done) “will make use of government benefits”, if access to such benefits would be available. So, I’ll stick with the claim that saying there was “open borders” before the 1920s in the US is misleading, and that at least some people who say they want “open borders” are not being clear or careful enough.
Funnily enough this also applies to EU “freedom of movement” (a surprising number of FoM enthusiasts on the left do not know about this and do not want to talk about it).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/147/free-movement-of-persons
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