that make up the originating society. Conversely, at the other end, immigrant workers are but exceptionally "birds of passage," to recall Michael Piore's (1977) well-known book, for they too are changed in and by migration: they become irrevocably distanced and dis-located from their originating milieu, losing a place in their native circle of honor without securing one in their new setting; they acquire this false and disjointed "double-consciousness"6that is source of both succor and pain; they are consumed by doubt, guilt and self-accusation, worn down by an "unjust and uncertain" battle with their own children, these "sociological bastards" who personify the horrifying impossibility of the "return home" (Sayad 1988). A retired Algerian laborer settled in a working-class banlieue of Paris puts it pithily: France, I'm gonna tell you, is a low-life woman, like a whore. Without you know it, she encircles you, she takes to seducing you until you've fallen for her and then she sucks your blood, she makes you wait on her hand and foot. (...) She is a sorceress. She has taken so many men with her... she has a way of keeping you a prisoner. Yes, she is a prison, a prison from which you cannot get out, a prison for life.