At the time of his death, the sociologist of immigration Abdelmalek Sayad (1933-1998) was putting the final touches on a collection of his principal articles—since published under the title La Double Absence.1 The publication of this collection provides, I think, a good occasion for introducing Sayad to the anglophone public, which to date has had almost no exposure to his work. In France, Sayad’s sociology has been essential not only to the study of Algerian immigration, but to the understanding of migration as a “fait social total,” a total social fact, which reveals the anthropological and political foundations of contemporary societies. The introduction of this exceptional work to American specialists of French studies is timely, moreover, because immigration and more recently, colonization have been among the most dynamic areas of research in the field in the past few years. In America, these topics have mostly been the province of historians, although anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists have engaged them to a lesser degree. None of this work to date, however, has explored the relationship between colonization and immigration, and little of it moves beyond the disciplinary specialties of the authors. One of the great strengths of Sayad’s work is that it permits us to think outside these disciplinary enclosures. His research brings to light the historical processes through which the colonization of Algeria engendered Algerian immigration to France as well as the structural homologies that underlie the two phenomena. Sayad began to systematically explore this articulation in the early 1960s, and in the course of his career brought to bear a remarkably diverse sets of methods and angles of approach. These contributions are scattered throughout numerous articles and several collaborations, but despite this productivity Sayad never wrote a larger