These immigrants came as individuals, lived among French men and women, resembled them physically and for the most part professed catholic, Russian orthodox or Jewish faiths. Their arrival did not bring much change to the look or feel of France.
Muslims were another story. Most of the Muslims who entered France during the years after World War II came to work. Many were recruited by the government and industry for the low paying jobs. Most of them came from northern Africa. The largest number came from Algeria, which was until 1962 a part of France itself. Others came from morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali and islands in the Indian Ocean, all parts of the former French empire as well as from turkey. .
During the boom years of the 1960's Muslim workers mostly single men-were by and large tolerated by the French. Living in dormitories, often near the factories where they labored these men planned to return to their countries someday. Many sent home earnings to build houses and endured long and painful separations from their families while dreaming of returning to comfortable requirements. Children born in France were offered courses in their native languages on the assumption that they and their parents would pack up and leave when they were no longer needed as workers. The future did not turn out this way however. The men increasingly found themselves estranged from their home countries; many never learned French and found cultural integration difficult. Some married; others sent for their families to join them. Economic hard times in the 1970s turned French workers against them. Their children who were either born in France or immigrated at a very young age saw themselves as French and demanded full cultural citizen ship. As these younger residents began to emerge publicly as Muslims, demanding the right to have proper mosques, to buy halal meat, and to affirm their muslim identity through their dress and their practices of prayer and fasting they encountered new forms of hostility.