Hi! I saw this just now.
Using your logic there should have been NO migration to Algeria and yet there definitely was and it wasn't minor
That was not what I said. I had said that there were limited opportunities for migration.
[(1 million people is nothing to scoff at),
On the one hand, one million people is a lot of people.
On the other hand, the population of French Algerians at their numerical apogee was less than half the population of New Zealand, a country colonized at roughly the same time that was located on literally the other side of the world from its colonizer.
(It also goes without saying that French Algeria did not receive one million immigrants, hundreds of thousands.)
how do you explain the amount of migration that happened? It was far larger than the military and administration related migration that happened to other French colonies.
There were opportunities, just not enough good ones to attract the scale of immigration from Europe that would be transformative.
It is worth noting that unlike South Africa, Algeria's closest peer at the other end of the African continent, Algeria lacked the materials for the sort of relatively early industrialization that could have attracted lots of European migrants. Algeria did not have abundant coal or metal ores, for instance, and was only beginning to develop oil and gas resource at an early date. Colonial Algeria remained a deeply agricultural economy, one with a relatively closed frontier; there was just no empty land available, not with the Sahara neatly hemming in settlement and not with coastal Algeria having a latifundia sort of economy reliant on cheap native labour that worked well enough for the colonists.
Where would the migrants from Europe live? What would they do?
This is outright wrong, from the figures we have it seems clear that a higher amount of French people went to Algeria relative to the Americas,
Yes. The French knew about Algeria quite well, Algeria being a conquered territory of France under French rule on just the other side of the Mediterranean, and were accordingly relatively likely to weight it.
That could be described as a consequence of French people, and French migrants, overrating the attractiveness of the destination, much more easily than the French somehow not knowing the advantages that a nearby territory under their control could have. Take away French rule, or even French direct rule, and the numbers of migrants would drop accordingly.
the problem was that a lower amount of French people emigrated overall not that they didn't go specifically to Algeria because of its supposed low wages.
Well, no.
As we have seen in central and eastern Europe, particularly, countries can have very low or even negative rates of natural growth and still produce very large numbers of emigrants. Low fertility in a homeland may, or may not, have demographic consequences in the longer run; at least some sources suggest that French people of relatively recent southern European background have below-average fertility rates, although higher than in southern Europe. In the shorter run context of choices to emigrate, it has next to no consequence.
The French could well have emigrated in much larger numbers than OTL. That they did not go in such numbers to Algeria particularly indicates that they knew what Algeria could offer, not that they were somehow ignorant of its potential or choosing not to develop it.
In fact the geographic argument you made before explains the amount of Spaniards and Italians much better than wages do, it also explains the over-representation of Maltese in Tunisia.
Does it?
The comparison is off, at least half a million French people DID move to Algeria and France didn't have many own colonies that were as accessible to them compared to the Brits
Ignoring that number of immigrants from France particularly never came (lots of other southern Europeans, remember), the fact that French Algeria at its peak in the 1950s had less than half of the population of a New Zealand colonized at the same time but located on the opposite side of the world as its colonizer shows the unattractiveness of the colony.
At the very least you would have 20-25% more potential migrants if we don't assume the relative amount of migrants to total population would be lower, given you seem to ascribe to some sort of Malthusian paradigm(higher population leads to lower average wealth to some extent)
Of course not. Where do you get that idea?
Simply assuming that a larger population will produce more emigrants to a particular area is weird. How, exactly, would having a France of 50 million people in 1870 as opposed to 40 million do anything to make Algeria more attractive to settlement? What is the necessary link?
(A population between 20-25% larger does not have any relationship to the number of potential migrants. An age demographic just does not translate into that.)