The “problem” of immigration

Each of the items gathered by Choukri Hmed and Sylvain Laurens in the last delivery of the review Agone Demonstrates, through the analysis of concrete cases, the economic, social and political reasons for the construction of a certain vision of immigration in France and in Europe. Everyone makes it possible to challenge strangely familiar constructions on immigration and to dismantle the mechanisms.

Immigration like “ issue »»

The articles here gathered help to make us understand how immigration has been built as a public problem for more than a century. The empirical material ranges from the study of employees to the highest heights of the State to that of prefecture administrators, passing by immigration experts in the high public service, building employers, journalists and activists. Each at their level, they are all issuers of a discourse on immigration. By putting them in resonance with each other, the work makes it possible to better appreciate the construction of immigration as a problem in our societies.

The historical perspective is not absent from the analysis, which leads to considering a construction of the problem over time. Gérard Noiriel identifies the “ birth “From the problem to the turn of the 1880s, when the word” immigration »Integrates for the first time in the French political vocabulary. The phenomenon is then linked to two antithetical elements which seal the complex relationship of the state to immigration, between rejection and necessity: the fear of the foreigner on the one hand, and the demographic imperative, on the other hand. Benoît Larbiou highlights the emergence of two additional antithetical logics in the interwar period: the productive logic advocated by employers (foreign workforce is necessary for the French economy) and the logic of protection of national work (defended by the unions). However, from this period, experts from immigration appear within the central administration of the State. They are the first to pose a consensus on how to approach the question of immigration: to ensure that immigration provides workers to French entrepreneurs, without causing an imbalance in the labor market and without constituting a threat to public order, while ensuring a demographic succession.

The angles of attack diversify through the contributions of Victor Pereira and Choukri Hmed. Victor Pereira offers the point of view of a country of departure, Portugal from 1957 to 1974. Under the dictatorship of Salazar, if emigration is officially considered a problem because it deprives the major landowners with arms, it is unofficially considered as a solution as the influx of foreign currencies is desirable for an economy which is struggling to take the path of modernization. Choukri Hmed is interested in the mobilizations and the construction of a collective identity of immigrant workers on the occasion of the rent strike in homes (1973-1981). The image of the immigrant worker who comes out is then dependent on a determined political context: that of the workers’ movement and the rhetoric of the class struggle. It leaves aside other constituent elements of the identity of immigrant workers who could have been mobilized, such as the right to religious practice, for example.

Finally, the culmination of the historic part of this opus is the chronicle of the visit of the Malians to the Élysée, delivered by Sylvain Laurens. Through the story of this staging – the invitation to have lunch launched by Valery Giscard d’Estaing to the garbage collectors of the Élysée on the morning of December 24, 1974 -, he tension the opposite logics which animate the construction of the problem of immigration by the Head of State: the presidential demonstration of his social charity, on the one hand, and the cantonment of immigrant workers French economic, on the other hand. In 1974, mastery of migratory flows was presented as an instrument for resolving the crisis and the creation of a secretariat of State for immigrant workers devoted the construction of immigration as a public problem.

Immigrants as individuals “ issues »»

Contemporary contributions from the work relate less to the construction of immigration as a problem than that of immigrants as problematic individuals, because of their opinion, their mores or their illegal presence on the territory. Several results of ethnographic surveys make it possible to meet the eyes of a population under the sign of suspicion.

The investigation carried out by Jérôme Berthaut in the editorial hall of a national television news clearly shows the stages of the construction of the image of “ Young cities ». The posture of the journalist in search of contrasting opinions on the war in Iraq, the dynamics which is established within the editorial team and the role of the “ fixer ” – Interlocutor who serves as a guide” in the suburbs ” -, all these elements participate in the development of an image of children from immigration which has more to do with the political context – on September 11, 2001, the war in Iraq – than with any social reality. Everyone responds to broader issues and the meeting with the “ Young cities “Plays only a peripheral role, serving a media construction of social reality. Another ethnographic survey in prefecture offices features other immigrants, foreigners engaged in a naturalization process. Sarah Mazouz demonstrates that the latter take up a range of moral categories associated with a process, which is properly legal. Thus, the right to become French under specific criteria (residence, income, etc.), administrators and administered to slide towards the notions of “ deserved Associated with the fact of speaking French well or not to be veiled.

In the form of an epilogue, Nicolas Jounin’s contribution presents immigration no longer as a problem but as a solution, for building companies in search of cheap labor. The use of underground workers is hardly assumed by large companies, but well subcontracted to smaller structures which take legal and financial risks. Illegality is thus “ outsourced (P. 183). However, the appeal of sometimes undocumented immigrant workers is a solution to a problem that is not one. Indeed, the shortage of labor often advanced by large companies is essentially from the fact that remuneration is very low in this branch of activity compared to fatigue and the risks associated with it. Nicolas Jounin thus offers one of the few studies on the question of immigration seen by employers and his work echoes the analyzes of Benoît Larbiou on the importance of productive logic in the construction of immigration as a problem.

Critical look and “ intellectual modes »»

At the origin of the project is the desire of the two researchers to renew the field of studies on immigration. They manage to link, by a common problem, different objects. They also affirm their will to situate themselves “ offset Compared to Anglo-Saxon academic debates, “ intellectual modes Post-modern and post-colonial (p. 9-10). Indeed, the authors show us that the colonial dynamics are never absent in the construction of immigration as a problem. The actors of a policy operate a “ distance Immigrants, comparable to that practiced with colonial subjects. By criticism of the post-colonial, the authors hear the criticism of analyzes which do not attach enough importance to colonial logics. They are the opposite of another criticism, which seeks to evacuate the colonial period of our understanding of contemporary experience.

In order to re-situate the debate across the Atlantic, it should also be mentioned that some researchers who work on France “ post-colonial »Find in procedures specific to their academic universe. These issues structure research teams, beyond studies on France, and allow them to “ hold together », To use an expression used by the authors. Beyond the postulate on the contemporary situation, we can see in the use of post-colonial terminology a heuristic and structuring dimension. In addition, with regard to the study of immigration issues across the Atlantic, a difference in object must be kept in mind. It is difficult to find in American history a study of administrative practices, since the supervision of immigration has been little centralized. The history of the construction of immigration as a public problem makes sense in the context of a strong and centralized state like France.

Finally, to go in the direction of the editorial project of the work, it must be added that the work which is Post Colonial Studiesby the attention they give to the study of discourse, sometimes tend to move away from the study of concrete cases. Or “” Immigration invention »Puts actors’ practices at the heart of the analysis and benefits from a rich empirical material, thanks to the numerous research recently conducted on immigration. They allow a multiplication of looks and objects that provide new concrete and operational data for analysis. The reflection carried out in this work therefore does not situate it on the fringes of certain conceptual debates ; On the contrary, she places these contributions at the Center for Immigration Studies in France and Europe.