Early on, I stated that this book is about two central issues. We have so far been concerned mainly with the first of these: the ideological conceptualization of immigrant life, mainly by the French. We have seen how different elements in French society construe the nature of the population in question (whether they are to be thought of as “immigrants” or “foreigners”) and of their problems as hostel residents, as residents in HLM and cités de transit, as husbands and wives and fathers and daughters, as schoolchildren, as adult learners of the French language, and as workers.

The focus now switches to the second issue: representation in a political sense, an aspect of which was discussed in passing in Chapter 4 (where we looked at the hostel committees) and in Chapter 9 (the trade unions). The present chapter is in six parts. The first three deal with the more formal side of representation on and through a variety of committees and associations. The first examines participation in the consultative bodies at department level, and the work of those bodies in the formation of official policy toward immigrants. The second deals with the formal representation of immigrants in certain French institutions. The third looks at the position of such autonomous immigrant organizations as exist in Lyon. Parts four and five are concerned with informal systems of representation, and also attempt to relate this aspect to the conceptual issue by examining the transmission and processing of information.