TO THE FRANCE-FORIGN ASSOCIATION
How should we welcome foreign workers?

What remains in France from the great distress of the war years is a certain xenophobic nervousness. However, the impoverishment of our birth rate forces us to rely, in large proportions, on foreign workers for our countryside and our factories.

What should France's policy be towards the latter? Under the auspices of the France-Etranger Association, Mr. de Monzie, senator from Lot, presented yesterday the data of this “problem of political realism”.

Because in this matter there can only be a realistic and urgent solution. Even if, by a legislative miracle, the measures recommended to increase our birth rate could have an immediate yield, it would only be twenty years from now that France would benefit from them. However, as of now, our number of rural workers is missing a million workers; Our factories are missing 300 or 400,000 workers.

Where to find this workforce? We have enough difficulty assimilating the natives of our colonies locally for it to be possible to think of assimilating them to the work of the metropolis. We must therefore, whether we like it or not, resort to foreigners.

But a distinction is necessary.
The foreigner who interests us is the one who stays with us, who integrates into the population, who creates a home. Because I believe that we are capable of assimilating.

Let us return to our duty, concludes Mr. de Monzie. All French people conscious of the national interest, patriotic, realistic, must be with us. It is the urgent interest of French production which commands us to welcome foreigners who want to stay with us with the joy, the pride of collaborating on a great work.

Mr. Jean Richepin then took the floor and defined the “welcome program”, a work of tenderness and love to which the France-Foreign Association has dedicated itself.

We always think we'll find something new, he says. Now, all of this was already found in the oldest civilization, that of the Hellenes. Was it not someone named Socrates who proclaimed: “Before feeling like a citizen of Athens, I feel like a citizen of the world?”

Isn't it also in Athens that we saw foreigners, metics, become, after two generations, citizens like the others?
Poets are crazy, but they say simple things, concludes Mr. Jean Richepin. This assimilation of metics in the city was done by a poet. His name was Solon, and it was he who spoke of the necessity, for Athens to live, of receiving foreigners into its bosom.

“This is how France will once again become the great France loving the world and loved by the world. »