Abstract
The modern institutionalization of xenophobia begins with the nation-state and its principle of discrimination by place of birth. The foreigner is, in principle, legally banned, in fact overexploited, supervised and structurally subjected to principles of exception. Any form of nationalism thus poses the foreigner as a suspect by nature. We can then study the mechanisms that determine these periods when the State undertakes a systematic struggle against foreigners. These phenomena are generally explained by focusing on economic variables. Faced with rising unemployment and declining growth, the state would seek to promote the employment of nationals. “National preference”, from this point of view, is less a claim of the extreme right than a principle directing the law since the end of the Ancien régime. It must be admitted, however, that the capitalist economy relies permanently on the maintenance of a sub-proletariat to be exploited, to which the state refuses equality and that it must nevertheless reproduce to ensure the production of the most despised tasks. How to understand, in this context, the anti-migratory fight of the beginning of the 1970s which initiated the period in which we continue to live, where the postcolonial immigrant characterizes a kind of transversal scapegoat?
Keywords:
Migration; Nationalism; Police; Post-colonial; Security; Xenofobia; France; Sociology