[LINK] The lessons of the Pieds-noirs for Louisiana

[rfmcdonald]

Writing in The New Republic, Marisa Katz examines the similarities between the Hurricane Katrina refugees now and thepieds-noirs back in 1962. After Algeria gained its independence, the million-odd French settler community in Algeria fled to France almost in its entirety, hundreds of thousands of traumatized families overwhelming the local supplies of housing and jobs in southern France and meeting a hostile reaction from locals thanks to their reputation as racist reactionaries. Nonetheless, this influx was assimilated with some expected hiccups how. How?

The French model is telling both for its successes and its failures. Once it got its act together, and once it had stemmed the crisis with a crash program of emergency aid, the French government set about building housing, locating jobs, and offering incentives for geographic distribution. The government constructed tens of thousands of new residential units for people who had fled Algeria. It canvassed hundreds of thousands of companies for jobs, convinced them to keep vacancies open specifically for pied-noir applicants, alerted job seekers to the vacancies through a national media campaign, and then paid to get them to interviews. Finally, the government offered additional aid--and later made aid contingent--based on pieds-noirs' willingness to move beyond southern France. Still, in the spring of 1964, only half the Algerian refugee population had permanent housing. And many, particularly those who had worked in agriculture, were still looking for jobs. It wasn't until a boom in the French economy that the pieds-noirs were successfully absorbed. And, even then, economic integration masked social insecurity. More than 50 percent of pied-noir respondents to a survey said they had been received with indifference, reservation, or hostility. They felt ostracized by the metropolitan French--and would for generations to come.

The timely and effective intervention of the state, Katz demonstrates, was critical. Reintegrating refugees on the cheap would never have worked out. The Bush Administration should pay attention to this precedent.