immigrants. The clear continuity between the logic of the workers’ movement and that of French associations close to immigrant workers is therefore not altogether surprising.
Foreign workers were accepted as union members by virtue of working in the same places as other workers and participating in the same daily round of productive activity. That is, foreign workers were entitled to union membership by virtue of their physical location and social roles, not their national legal status or legal relationship to the state. Not surprisingly, French unions aimed not at enabling foreign workers to obtain French nationality, but rather at preventing their exploitation and avoiding downward pressure on wages by ensuring that they enjoyed equal social and economic rights. Even while their status as foreigners barred them from participating in local or national elections, laws passed in 1972 and 1975 gave them “the right to vote in ‘social’ elections for shop stewards, union representatives and plant committees.” In 1975, those who spoke French and had worked in France for five years or more also gained the right to run for office within trade unions (Schain 2008: 51). This precedent was stressed by LDH’s vice-president and professor of history at Paris VIII Madeleine Rebérioux, who clearly noted that it was within companies, as workers, that nationals and non-nationals had first obtained the equality of rights that she hoped to see extended to other arenas (1986: 7). In defending workers’ rights, trade unions relied heavily on direct organization and mobilization. Finally, unions appealed to workers’ economic contribution to society, in exchange for which workers were to be granted rights. While regretting that it had so far left foreign workers largely deprived of political and civil rights, one advocate of new citizenship pointed to the workplace as the privileged site where a new form of “economic citizenship” had already developed (Leclerc 1986: 30).
Relying on a very similar logic, “new citizenship” advocates pointed out that immigrants lived in the same places and participated in the same round of collective daily life as other members of their local communities. The fact that those residents who were not French nationals did not have the same legal status vis-à-vis the state as other long-term residents was deemed irrelevant to their right to participate and be represented in local politics. As one article defending the “new citizenship” project argued, “What counts, in order to be a citizen, is to live, to work, [and] to love on a given territory. Nationality is a wholly different affair” (Guattari and Donnard 1988: 15). Another supporter of the “new citizenship” agenda advocated the extension of political rights to immigrants as a way of “permitting those who live in a territory to participate in the daily life of that territory” (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 29). Or, as FASTI in 1985 explained its own support for immigrants’ right to vote, “It [FASTI] sees the acquisition of this right as the recognition of a part of the population living in this country as citizens.”10 Thus, the appeal of the new citizenship campaign was, in part, to a Contract perspective emphasizing active participation in collective activity.
Following the unions’ example, the new citizenship campaign did not strive to make foreigners French; it sought to improve their rights as foreigners. The campaign simply transferred this logic from the field of social and economic rights, and voting rights within firms, to civil and political rights beyond firms. While the workers’ movement sought to ensure that foreign workers had the rights necessary to defend themselves from economic exploitation, the new citizenship movement sought to ensure that they had the right to vote and could defend themselves against racist, demagogic appeals. If permitted to participate in local elections “as actors,” it was argued, immigrants would be less likely to figure in them as an issue (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27).
Here again, giving foreigners the rights they needed to avoid exploitation was to protect the larger community from harm as well, in this case from the rise of racism in French politics and society. LDH Immigration Commission president Henri Leclerc reasoned in defense of local political rights, “It is in not permitting immigrants to participate fully in daily life that one reinforces [social] separation, exclusion, racism” (Leclerc 1986: 31). Or, as FASTI announced following the killing of several foreigners by French police officers, in response to which other groups had engaged in demonstrations, “the analysis that it [FASTI] makes of the situation leads it to put all of its strength into a long-term struggle for equal rights between French and Immigrants and for the acquisition of a new citizenship for the latter. This is … the best form of struggle against racism.”11
Though the “new citizenship” cause aimed precisely to enable long-term foreign legal residents to vote and thus to participate in conventional electoral politics, its defenders often presented local voting rights as a step toward empowerment within civil society rather than national political participation, depicting local voting as more closely akin to participation in a cooperative or firm than national party politics. For instance, one article appealing for citizenship for non-nationals decried the existence of “[immigrant] masses … without civic attachment who haunt our walls like the slaves of ancient cities, dependent on their boss, on their landlord, on the policemen in their neighborhood, without there being granted to them in exchange a taking of citizenship (une prise de citoyenneté) in relation to the social spaces that concern them” (Guattari and Donnard 1988: 15–16). Meanwhile, the president of the Immigrants Commission of LDH explained League support for extending local voting rights to immigrants by drawing this parallel:
One must admit that there exists, as there does at the factory, as in the working world, as in the university, a community of interests, a tie based on mutual political management (gestion politique) where democracy must be expressed as fully as possible, that is to say, through the expression of all those without exception who are part of it [the community of interests] regardless of their birth. Only residency [not nationality] should therefore be taken into consideration [in determining voting rights]. (Leclerc 1986: 31)
This human rights organization official thus likened participation of foreign residents in their communities to participation of workers in their factories, and to empowerment within civil society more generally.
Again framing moral claims in terms familiar from labor politics, intellectual advocates of “new citizenship” also regularly highlighted the economic contribution of foreign participants to French society, through both working and paying taxes (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 29; Weil 1993: 2). The campaign thus appealed not only to Contract but also to Monetized Contract models of membership. As Rebérioux complained in an address to the Collective for Civil Rights (Collectif des Droits Civiques), an organization of second-generation Franco-Maghrebin youth whose positions in 1985 included support for local immigrant voting rights: “Civic rights are always refused to foreigners. They have the right to work, barely [have the right] to be unemployed since [then] they are threatened by exclusion, [and they have the right] to pay their taxes.” Rightfully, she argued, they should therefore have the right “to participate in the choice of those who tax.”12 Implicitly pointing to their economic contribution to the community as a basis for a legitimate entitlement to citizenship, LDH president Yves Jouffa also believed that the fact that only some taxpayers were citizens contributed to racism, thus suggesting that, to discourage racism, all taxpayers should enjoy the benefit of citizenship (Jouffa 1986: 3). The president of LDH’s Immigrants Commission also criticized the exclusion of the non-national resident from political rights, despite the fact that he “pays taxes and is … counted as a contributor in the determination of the rate of local taxation,” and despite the fact that public taxing and spending already implicitly required recognizing him as a member of the community because the nature and amount of “local facilities is calculated as a function of his presence (Leclerc 1986: 30).” In defending the idea of local voting rights, SOS-Racisme president Désir argued not only that they would encourage greater attachment and responsibility toward the local community and that non-national residents were concerned with the same local matters—such as municipal day-care centers and swimming pools—as everyone else. He also argued that foreign residents paid taxes like everyone else (Désir 1987).
Like the workers’ movement, the “new citizenship” campaign thus actually drew on two different ideas about the moral basis for equal rights, appealing
