William Berthomiere

The Immigration of Foreign Workers: a Mirror of Israel’s Changing Identity

Like so many people arriving from the Paris-Lod night-flight, I was patiently waiting in line 5 to give my tourist card to the border officer before taking a flight to Jerusalem. As a frequent visitor to Israel, I was used to queuing and drowsing in front of the counters. But this time, two events attracted my attention. Firstly, as we were dropped by the bus at the entrance to the terminal an unusual scene was occurring in a corner of the customs hall. A young police officer was insistently questioning a very elegant man holding an attache case. So far, there was nothing really astonishing except the fact that the latter was wearing a lovely blue bubu braided with gold. A second, no less surprising event soon followed which helped me to recover from the languor of waiting. Despite the fact that the travellers seemed tired, I could feel a clamour of excitment growing behind me. Glancing quickly, I saw six or maybe seven young men of Asian origin queuing up. They were hastily threading their way towards the counters much to the growing annoyance of the ‘patient ones’, like me. Nevertheless, as the police officer saw the group, and as one of them raised an envelope, apparently containing a range of passports and documents, everything returned to tranquillity and order. They crossed the checkpoint and entered Israel. Very quickly, these two events which broke the monotony of my passage through customs, awoke me to the realization that a new phenomenon was affecting Israel: the immigration of foreign workers.

The Integration of Immigrants in France: Economic and Geographical Approach

Integration is a key issue in the literature about migration. It refers to a set of public policies aiming at integrating foreign populations in a given society. This paper aims at investigating the relationships between the integration of four communities installed in France (Algerian, Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese) and the presence of associations. The methodology is rooted on two approaches, quantitative economics and geography. It uses a new database, extracted from the Official Journal and several surveys, noticeably TeO. In a first step, we ask whether the regional distribution and the density of associations explain the degree of integration of the migrants stemming from the four communities. In a second step, we test whether memberships into an association increase or decrease the adoption of oppositional identities and if the latter influences the integration via the access to employment.

L'immigration d'ex-URSS depuis 1990 : Les principales sources statistiques en Israël

The main sources for data on immigration to Israel are described, with particular reference to recent immigration from the former Soviet Union. The sources described include official sources including the census and special surveys on immigrants.