Alfred Sauvy and Immigration

Alfred Sauvy's short paper published in 1946 in the first issue of Population has a rather strange title: "Évaluation des besoins de l'immigration française" (Assessment of French immigration needs). In fact, it concerns neither "immigration needs", nor "French immigration", but rather the needs of France in terms of immigration. Just after the Liberation, France lacked the necessary manpower to undertake its economic reconstruction, and the idea of recruiting foreign workers, as was done after the First World War, seemed a logical one. Sauvy assumes that this utilitarian attitude to immigration is shared by all; he mentions the major contribution to be made by farmers, construction workers and miners brought in from abroad. But he takes the idea one step further: beyond their contribution to rebuilding the economy, immigrants would also provide a solution, over the longer term, to the country’s demographic imbalance and, more specifically, to the challenge of population ageing. Like many of his contemporaries, Sauvy was haunted by this problem. In 1946, 16% of France’s population was aged over 60. While this proportion was much smaller than that observed today (24%), it was a world record at the time, as Sauvy does not fail to point out. For Sauvy, this “abnormally high proportion” was attributable to the combined effects of secular population decline and the collapse of births during the Great War. With considerable economy of means, Sauvy runs a simulation to determine France’s needs in terms of immigration. His stated target is a “stationary population” as defined by Alfred Lotka, namely an “ideal” population in which young people are sufficiently numerous and fertile to ensure generation replacement and to maintain the “structural balance”.