SOURCE: Brett, Michael. Review of French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5079 (4 August 2000): 30.

In the following review, Brett discusses Ben Jelloun's indictment of French prejudice against North African immigrants in French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europeans settled in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. But over the past hundred years, the flow has reversed: North African immigrants have settled in France, to the point at which, by 1990, they numbered over one and a half million, roughly the size of the European population of French North Africa before its massive exodus in the wake of the struggle for Independence in 1955-62. As their children, born in the country, become French on attaining their majority, North Africans would appear to have evened the score; except that where Europeans in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were largely...