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The categorization of populations according to their origins (in particular in local authority housing) is often justified by the increase in the number of foreigners in France starting in the 1960s. The research presented here puts forward another explanation: the role played by the administrative personnel in charge of the colonial supervision of the Algerians (the technical advisors for Muslim affairs) and the conditions of their “integration” in the metropolitan administrative apparatus after the Algerian War. These officials imported and disseminated among their metropolitan counterparts the notion that the Algerians constituted a homogeneous and specific population. They advocated a policy of separation and distribution of this population over the urban territory. At the end of the Algerian War, the technical advisors for Muslim affairs extended this model to the “foreigners” as a whole, applying the same categorizations they had previously used for the “native Algerians,” who then found themselves merged into a wider set. The substitution of the “foreigner” with the “immigrant” and the institutionalization of urban renewal policies at the beginning of the 1970s thus contributed to extending the colonial system of classification.