In this book, Bouamama achieves a remarkable intellectual feat: he reviews the history of migration and its governance in France since the 19th century. From the internal migrations of Bretons, Auvergne residents, and other populations from the French periphery to Paris, Lyon, or Marseille, to the recent migrations from the former French African colonies, not forgetting the Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese who worked in French industry from the beginning of the 20th century, the same narrative and the same mode of governance are repeated in every case. Immigrants are considered, by nature or culture, difficult to understand, averse to work, and almost impossible to integrate into French society. Thus, despite the self-proclaimed republican model of integration, immigration has always been governed with similar policies and discourses, aimed at keeping this population in the hardest, lowest-paying, and least secure jobs. The novelty, however, in the governance of recent migrants is that they have become trapped in a kind of permanent foreignness. The children of these migrants, French in every respect, have inherited from their parents or grandparents a subordinate social status that prevents them from being considered full citizens. This manifests itself in the constant discrimination against populations of North African or sub-Saharan descent in matters of housing, employment, and public treatment. Heirs to a colonial history, unlike other historical migrations, these populations have risen in the national agenda, accused of a segregating “communitarianism” and of being bearers of a culture (especially in the case of Muslims) unassimilable by the French nation. Subjected to state racism, they have thus become the particular internal enemy with which the French Republic seeks to purge its profound social crisis.