The Invention of Illegal Immigration: Constructing Clandestine Immigrants in France and the UK, 1960-75

The concept of ‘illegal’ immigration is a relatively recent political and legal construct in European countries: indeed, it was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the transgression of immigration controls was identified as a social problem requiring political and legal intervention. However, our archival research on France and the UK suggests that the social issue was identified and constructed in quite different ways over this period. In France the issue was conceived as a problem of irregular labour in the context of concerns about labour relations. In the UK, by contrast, the issue emerged as a concern around border control in the context of rising levels of Commonwealth immigration. This divergence raises interesting theoretical questions about how public authorities identify and construct ‘new’ social problems. The paper traces and compares the emergence of illegal immigration as a problem in France and the UK, exploring two related aspects of issue definition. First, it asks how illegal entry and/or stay were identified as social problems in the two countries. We employ Jones and Baumgartner’s concept of ‘index construction’ to explore how civil servants and politicians in each national context selected, combined and weighted information in order to delineate the problem. Second, the paper explores how the issue was framed in both contexts. Here, we draw on institutionalist notions of background ideas that shape and constrain how policy problems are constructed.