Trajectories and Origins: Survey on the Diversity of the French Population

This book provides the main findings of a ground-breaking survey on immigrants and the second generation in France. The data, collected from more than 20, 000 persons representative of the population living in France, offer invaluable insights into the trajectories and experience of ethnic minorities.

The book explains how France has been an immigrant-receiving country for over a century and how it is now a multicultural society with an unprecedented level of origin diversity. While immigrants and their descendants are targets of clichés and stereotyping, this book provides unique quantitative findings on their situation in all areas of personal and working life.

Is origin in itself a factor of inequality? With its detailed reconstitutions of educational, occupational and conjugal trajectories and its exploration of access to housing and health, this book provides multiple approaches to answering this question.

One of the work’s major contributions is to combine objective and subjective measures of discrimination: this is the first study in France to focus on racism as experienced by those subjected to it, while opening up new methodological perspectives on the experience of prejudice by origin, religion, and skin colour.