3 July 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of a significant, yet little known, event in French history: the declaration of an end to the recruitment of economic migrants. Over the previous decades, some three million migrant workers had arrived to surprisingly little fanfare, building the economic growth later mythologized by Jean Fourastié as the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ – a time of plenty, from which immigrant workers themselves, living in slums and even shantytowns, were, however, largely excluded. In 1974 this mass labour migration was abruptly halted...