State Xenophobia?

Xenophobia lay behind the legal barriers set up between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s to deter doctors from outside France (“foreign doctors”) from practicing medicine in France. Does this mean that xenophobia as embedded in law was the principal reason that doctors from the former French colonies and protectorates were kept in low-status jobs within the medical field, reinforced by public policy, up until the regulatory measures of the late 1990s? Using sociological and historical materials, this paper provides some answers to this question by analyzing changes in the situation of foreign doctors and in the debate and measures related to this issue between the postwar years and the mid-2000s.