On 23 August last year, riot police raided Saint Bernard's church in the Goutte d'Or district of Paris, and evicted more than 200 undocumented workers, many of them Malians, who were seeking sanctuary and some of them on hunger strike. (A fair proportion of them actually had residence rights but lacked the documentation to prove it.) It was no doubt this drama which stimulated a table ronde entitled 'Républiques et coutumes' organized in Paris on 4 June by Catherine Quiminal for the Association Fran aise des Anthropologues (AFA), and focused primarily on the issue of undocumented workers or sans papiers in France. Emmanuel Terray was the senior speaker, and he contended that this issue, far from being marginal, was at the heart of today's political economy.

Many of those represented in the Paris collective of sans papiers representing over 30 different nationalities, with whom Terray has undertaken field research, are, he said, model citizens and workers, finding employment in restaurants and in the cleaning and garment industries. He argued that they help make the French economy more competitive by making possible 'delocalization on the spot', i.e. providing the same cost advantages as a business can gain through exporting jobs overseas. (According to one press report, there are up to one million sans papiers in France, in addition to some four million legal foreign residents.) Terray argued in his presentation that the French authorities at ground level were resorting to a policy of intimidation and that there was a gap between what the law said and how it was applied in practice.

Another speaker, Jean-Loup Amselle, said that, though a 'racism of purity' still characterized the Front National, the abandoning of racial categories by biologists had resulted in what he called a new form of racism based on the idea of lineage, which might well find some support in the Human Genome Project as popularly interpreted. The extreme right-wing political authorities in Toulon in the south of France (according to another paper, by Edouard Conte) seek to eliminate all reference to place of birth as legitimation for citizenship; in their publications they flatter Proven al and Alsatian regionalism, and also revive anti-Jewish caricatures of the 1930s with the effect that Arabs in the south can sometimes hear themselves described as 'filthy Jews'. A Front National slogan goes: être français, a s'hérite ou a se mérite ('Being French is inherited or merited').

Terray and some of his AFA colleagues spoke at the meeting against the popular perception that Europe's living standards are menaced by a tidal wave of immigrants seeking the benefits of health care, education and government aid. It is true that economists tend to be more positive about the overall effects of immigration than politicians, as well as perhaps less convinced that it can in practice be reduced. It is also true that migrants tend to be pre-selected in terms of ambition and willingness to work. But the reaction of the settled majority in countries such as France is clearly a social fact which has to be taken account of and studied, just as is the dream of so many poor people in North Africa, Latin America and elsewhere to build up personal links with a Western nation through emigration by a family member. One of the less publicized immigration routes is by Moroccans across the Straits of Gibraltar, with the result that the 60,000 Moroccans officially resident in Spain are probably equaled in number by 'illegals'.

A Spanish politician is reported as saying, after the detention of several hundred would-be North African immigrants last year, that 'the wave of immigrants will not stop until the EU takes steps to improve the economic situation in the countries from which they come'. But Morocco is typical of many countries to the south and east of Europe with a rapidly rising population. To take another example, the new Hong Kong has inherited large-scale coercive procedures to attempt to keep out undocumented immigrants from mainland China. A major channel of trafficking in undocumented migrants between Punjab and the U.K., via Poland and other countries, was exposed in a recent BBC Television Panorama programme The Migrant Mafia (14 July); the researchers have estimated that about half the clients of these unscrupulous 'travel agencies' reach their destination and the other half do not. A search through recent years of The Times on CD-ROM reveals the phrase 'illegal immigration' coming up in the same bracket as other scourges of civilization (environmental pollution and drug trafficking) that Western leaders periodically pledge themselves to crush. Is the issue of 'undocumented workers' (to use a more acceptable term, but one not yet adopted in political and journalistic discourse) one which anthropologists can and should be addressing? The following quotations from social studies of New York City and Denmark respectively show a wide difference of approach:

.. New immigrants provide a fresh source of below-subsistence-cost workers tolerant of [New York's] exploitative labour conditions. Specifically, in east Harlem the majority of the new immigrants are Mexicans from the rural states of Puebla and Guerrero. The poverty of their natal villages makes them a highly disciplined, inexpensive workforce capable of fulfilling the enormous needs that well-paid FIRE [finance, insurance and real estate] sector executives have for personal services: housekeepers, office cleaners, delivery personnel, boutique attendants, restaurant workers. 1
Undocumented new-immigrants are so crucial to New York City's economy that its politicians, both Republican and Democrat, publicly embraced the right of the undocumented to live and work in the city during the same years (mid-1990s) when the rest of the United States, especially California, was in the throes of an anti-immigrant hysteria. (Philippe Bourgois, 1951)

The reason for the absence of illegal immigrants on the labour markets in the Nordic countries may provide us with ideas as to how to prevent the unfortunate use of such immigrants in the other EU countries. ... The risk involved in employing illegal labour immigrants is the crucial factor. To employ aliens without labour permit is illegal, and in some States is also contrary to the collective agreements between the unions and the employers associations. If collective agreements play a dominant role in the relationship between employers and employees in a State, we must expect that any employer who violates them by employing illegal immigrants will be stopped by both the unions and their own association. (Jan Hjarn 2 , 1962)

Though there is some research on similar themes being undertaken in Britain (for instance a project by Bridget Anderson, of Leicester University, on Asian domestic workers 3 ), it is in the United States that a large research literature has been generated, which can be found in journals such as Urban Anthropology and International Migration Review and in a number of full-length books (for instance, in Nancy Foner's New Immigrants series published by Allyn and Bacon). The tendency of American anthropologists is to focus on particular immigrant populations and in this context to study the special problems and dilemmas faced by the undocumented (resisting on principle the definition of the undocumented as a 'problem' in mainstream public discourse, especially in California) where the financial burdens on the taxpayer to provide welfare services are widely seen by the settled citizenry as punitive. It can be argued that for a researcher even to focus on the 'problem' as such is to act against the interests of the undocumented. If they are doing better than they would in their countries of origin, as many are in Germany for instance, why stir things up? To set against this important political point, it must be noted that human rights unsupported by citizens' rights, i.e. meaningful access to forums such as those accorded to legal residents, are extremely limited rights; and the only political remedy can be to draw attention to absence of rights.

What would be the implications of taking seriously the opinion of Emmanuel Terray that the issue of the undocumented should be regarded by researchers as a central one of our day? To start with, there is for obvious reasons a lack of the most elementary statistical data. Second, the question will be asked by the subjects of such research, 'for whose benefit is it being undertaken?' Trusted NGOs and church organizations may be the most appropriate sponsors.4 But the topic is not without academic content. As the AFA organizers noted in their prospectus for the meeting, 'The opposition between 'rights of blood' [jus sanguinis] and 'rights of soil' [jus solis] calls in question the foundations of French citizenship but also the themes of filiation, consanguinity, ancestorship and autochthony which have long been studied by anthropologists'. Moreover, a book like Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory, now remembered more by archaeologists than by anthropologists, might help us understand the process whereby the non-recognition of the undocumented is deemed to strengthen the cohesion and compatibility of those who do satisfy the criteria for group membership.

An experienced British politician of the Liberal Democrat Party with whom I discussed this issue recently told me that, much as he personally values cultural diversity, he privately and reluctantly accepts that the governmental decisions made a generation ago to restrict immigration have resulted in an improvement in ethnic relations within Britain. In the meantime, some theoreticians argue that the best way to stimulate the world economy and reduce poverty would be to allow flows of labour to be as freely globalized as are flows of capital. But what would be the cost in political stability in the industrial democracies?

Just because good quantitative data are hard to come by in this area of research, anthropologists may have a special contribution to offer with qualitative studies, and a study such as Sarah J. Mahler's American Dreaming: Immigrant Life in the Margins (Princeton U.P., 1995), about mainly undocumented Salvadoran and South American immigrants in suburban New York, shows how problems of access and methods can be surmounted.5 Perhaps the study of undocumented workers is at the same stage of development as was the study of refugees some twenty years ago, when a number of ethnographic field studies on refugees were coming to publication and a few social scientists such as Barry Stein were arguing that various refugee movements, widely separated in space and time, had marked commonalities.6 Anthropologists now make a recognized contribution to refugee-related research, and in future they may well do so in the study of issues relating to undocumented migrant workers

Jonathan Benthall

I am grateful to Michael Banton and Nancy Foner for information and assistance, but neither bears responsibility for any opinions expressed.

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