Emigration from the French Caribbean: the Origins of an Organized Migration

The authors analyze the French governments organized support of labor migration from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe to France. "The specific goal here is to examine the origins and early workings of the organized migration policy during the 1960s....[The paper] has three principal aims: first to set these flows in the broader contexts of Caribbean emigration and of French immigration; second to trace the origins of the state institutional framework of migration during the 1950s and 1960s particularly the setting up of the migration agency the Bureau for Migration from the Overseas Departments... and opposition to it; and third to assess the early workings of the policy through the records of individual migrants." (EXCERPT)