A World in Movement

Michel Wieviorka
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme

Abstract 
Traditionally, social sciences have studied migrations from the view point of in­
tegration within the framework of nation states, with more interest in integration 
into society than in real people, their culture and subjectivity. They have barely 
studied the country of origin, or the difficulties involved in transit. Nowadays, the 
migratory phenomenon is diverse and changes continuously. Identities undergo 
a constant process of transformation, even when they are connected to migra­
tion while social scientists have developed such notions as panethnicity and trans­
nationalism. The time has finally come to put an end to the so­called sociology 
of integration, and seriously consider the point of view migrants as subjects in a 
global world. In several societies, however, many people like to speak in terms of 
integration. But “integration models” are now a failure.

Keywords: 1. migration, 2. identity, 3. subjectivation, 4. integration, 5. trans­
nationalism.

Un mundo en movimiento

Resumen
Las ciencias sociales clásicas han estudiado las migraciones desde el punto de vista de 
la integración dentro del marco de los Estados­nación y con un interés más dirigido 
hacia la integración de la sociedad que hacia la gente real, su cultura y su subjeti­
vidad. Se ha estudiado poco, tanto los países de origen como las dificultades en el 
tránsito. En la actualidad, los fenómenos migratorios son diversos y cambiantes. Las 
identidades se encuentran en constante proceso de cambio, incluyendo las que se 
vinculan con la migración, por lo que algunos científicos sociales han desarrollado 
conceptos tales como el de la panetnicidad y el transnacionalismo. Finalmente, ha 
llegado el momento de acabar con la llamada sociología de la integración y de to­
mar seriamente en cuenta el punto de vista de los migrantes como personas en un 
mundo global. En muchas sociedades, sin embargo, a la gente le gusta hablar en tér­
minos de integración. Pero en la actualidad los modelos de integración son un fracaso.

Palabras clave: 1. migración, 2. identidad, 3. subjetivación, 4. integración, 5. trans­
nacionalismo.

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Introduction

The world is moving, and so are social sciences. 
This is why migration has become a main concern in France, a 

country where this issue has had a relatively secondary role since 
the end of the Second World War. In other parts of the world, 
the problem of migration has been important for a long time, 
particularly in countries built upon the—near—destruction of 
the “first” peoples and large waves of immigration. The United 
States, for instance, are proud of being a country of immigrants: 
visiting Ellis Island, at the entrance of the New York Harbor, 
is enough to perceive this. The visitor’s passion is remarkable 
and has nothing to do with the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de 
l’Immigration [National City of the History of Immigration], in 
Paris. While France discovered its history of immigration during 
the mid­eighties, with the pioneer work of Yves Lequin or Gérard 
Noiriel, the United States celebrated the anniversary of the arrival 
of the Statue of Liberty, symbolizing the construction of their 
country by immigrants—they nevertheless forgot to mention the 
less glorious arrival of the Blacks, who came in the holds of slave 
trade ships, and avoided talking about the annihilation of the In­
dians. In this paper, I will highlight the qualitative dimensions of 
migratory phenomena and their implications for social sciences. 
But is it possible to avoid mentioning their quantitative dimen­
sions? I will settle here for quoting a figure by Catherine Wihtol de 
Wenden: “the volume of migration has tripled in thirty years and 
almost every region in the world is currently concerned with the 
departure, transit or reception of increasingly mobile peoples with 
increasingly diversified profiles” (Wihtol de Wenden, 2009:15).

The Contribution of Classical Social Sciences 

In their classical form, social sciences have studied migratory 
phenomena by examining them, essentially, from the viewpoint 
of nation states and the migrant groups who have settled there. 
After the grand age of the Chicago School, to which we will re­

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 47

turn later, social sciences were dominated during the 1940s and 
1950s by paradigms of Durkheimian or functionalist inspiration, 
and they developed a mode of analysis which oversees the essen­
tials of the societies of origin,—nearly—ignores the difficulties of 
transit, and seeks above all to study the modalities of immigrant 
integration. Thus, the study of immigration focuses on a soci­
ety’s capacity to receive the newly arrived and seeks above all to 
examine the ways in which they find their place in it. From this 
viewpoint, migrants can either become assimilated, namely they 
abandon their cultural particularities in one or two generations, 
sometimes even in the spheres of private life, everyday life and 
home, or they become integrated, namely they maintain certain 
characteristics peculiar to their culture of origin, like eating or 
dressing habits, religions, languages, while nevertheless becoming 
full­fledged citizens.

Whether assimilation or integration predominates depends 
rather on the receiving society’s political culture than on the na­
ture of the involved groups: during the past two centuries, France 
has developed a republican culture encouraging assimilation more 
than integration, but this culture is currently being questioned 
and for around two decades there has been talk of the French 
model being in crisis. In the so­called “anglosaxon” countries, in­
tegration is more traditional: groups or minorities largely main­
tain their own identity, even if it becomes superficial, not to say 
artificial, and depends more on the logics of production and in­
vention, than on the logics of reproduction. On a planetary level, 
the general trend is to abandon assimilationist models in favor 
of integrative formulas, themselves more or less open to multi­
culturalism. 

These classical approaches to migratory phenomena focus on 
migrants based on their point of arrival rather than on their soci­
ety of origin. Ultimately, they focus less on migrants, their history, 
their trajectory, their hopes and difficulties, than on the way in 
which the receiving society works and how it eventually becomes 
disrupted by their arrival. For functionalist­ or Durkheimien­in­
spired social sciences, migrants must either adapt to the values, 

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norms and social roles of the society they have chosen to live in, 
or otherwise become part of the dangerous classes, the margin­
als, social misfits, troublemakers. From this standpoint, certain 
identity traits, either peculiar to migrants or otherwise originated, 
are not understood as possible sources of progress or innovation; 
they are rather seen as signs of archaism, as reminders of a super­
seded age, remains of certain traditions, conveyed by individuals 
or groups related to cultures thought of as inferior or exotic. This 
is why, historically, studying migrants was primarily the work of 
anthropologists, whether they examined folklore in modern soci­
eties or focused on remote societies.

In other, not less classical approaches, particularly embodied by 
the sociologists of the so­called Chicago School, which precedes 
the peak of functionalism, two important dimensions deserve to 
be highlighted. The first one refers to the society of origin, to the 
reasons why individuals and groups choose to migrate, and to 
the bonds that eventually linger between both social universes, 
the receiving society and the society of origin—this is the appeal, 
for instance, of the famous work of William Thomas and Florian 
Znaniecki about “The Polish Peasant  in Europe and America”, 
which reveals such bonds and was published during the interwar 
period. The second dimension which escapes functionalist ap­
proaches is the interest some works show in relation to the differ­
ences that, at least in some societies, still culturally characterize 
the descedants of migrants in their inscription in space and in 
their contribution to what the so­called Chicago School called 
urban ecology during the interwar period (Grafmeyer and Jo­
seph, 1979).

Classical social sciences have not only offered modes of ap proach ­
ing migratory phenomena as essentially reduced to im mi gration 
phenomena. They have also shown interest in mobility—an 
important category. From this viewpoint, mobility is basically 
studied and reflected on at a local or, above all, national level. 
Classically, it is studied in social and spatial terms: within a soci­
ety or nation state, or within a limited territory, like a metropoli­
tan area, for instance, individuals move upwards or downwards, 

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 49

they pass from one social class or status to another, from one 
geographical location to another. The study can focus on the tra­
jectory of individuals, or on the generations involved. 

Currently, however, the functionalist or Durkheimian model 
to analyse migratory phenomena, as well as the approaches de­
rived from the inspiration of the American Chicago sociologists, 
are not enough to explain the diversity and complexity of such 
phenomena, and the concept of integration is everywhere con­
sidered problematic. And if mobility has a sense, it is not only, or 
even mainly, the sense it adopts within a society or a nation state: 
primarily, mobility is nowadays the fact or the desire of being able 
to move around the whole planet; it has ceased to be, or to be 
only, an internal social issue, now it has gone global. 

This must be stated clearly: it is not only the real world which 
is in movement, it is the theoretical world, the world of analysis 
and its paradigms, which collapsed since the late 1960s, that is to 
say, in clearly less than half a century.

Change in migratory phenomena 

Migratory phenomena are extremely diversified, and even if this 
diversity is not entirely new, the fact remains that it is better per­
ceived today. And although the more classical analyses, particu­
larly the funcionalist ones, or inherited from the Chicago School, 
have evidently not lost their entire relevance, other approaches are 
now needed. 

The first thing deserving analysis is the transit between de­
parture and arrival, for migratory flow is not just any flow, a trip 
as any other, it can involve a difficult passage. This can include 
several different stages, both legal and illegal, long stays, both vol­
untary and involuntary, in transit countries. For example, many 
of the numerous Iraqi Christians who left their country are in 
Istanbul, where they have to wait several years, in some cases, 
before they can move on to Europe, the United States or Austra­
lia. Some societies constitute spaces of transit and organize them­
selves accordingly, providing migrants with lodgings in camps, 

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when necessary. Immigration societies do not necessarily want to 
admit that they can sometimes be transit areas for some people, 
as if there being immigrants who want something other than be­
coming integrated into this or that country—which they really 
only want to cross—were inconceivable. In France, for instance, it 
was not until after the spectacular closing down of the Red Cross 
Center at Sangatte, ordered by Nicolas Sarkozy, the Minister of 
the Interior at the time, that the public opinion and the media re­
alized that the thousands of migrants that had arrived in France, 
often from the Middle East, wanted to cross the English Channel 
and continue to Great Britain, Scandinavia or North America 
(Laacher, 2002). This example reveals an important dimension of 
transit: its modalities depend, to a large extent, on governmental 
intervention, since it is states who establish the transit framework, 
pass agreements between them, decide whether to give visas or 
not, establish asylum policies, build walls and gates, hunt down 
illegals and “smugglers” or not, etcetera. Migration is not a long, 
calm river for everyone; we know it can be the child of war or 
civil war, of massive population displacements, of so­called natu­
ral catastrophes, that it can be associated to the worst kind of 
traffics, including human trafficking, and that these difficulties 
and dramas are not limited to the point of departure. Thus, what 
happens in the society of origin is often ignored or subjected to 
a division of labor, as if it were a field reserved for anthropology, 
while what happens in the society of arrival seems to fall under 
the domain of sociology. 

The modes of migrant displacement are also still often disre­
garded by researchers, or in spontaneous discourse. Some mi­
grants, as shown by Michel Péraldi, for instance, are constantly 
circulating, like the “ants” studied by Alain Tarrius (2003), who 
buy and sell all kinds of articles around the Mediterranean Basin, 
and also in Black Africa and the Middle East, but who never 
establish themselves anywhere, and appoint quasi­institutions to 
settle their disagreements, for example. Their nomadism is only 
a variant of a larger phenomenon that some sociologists consider 
to be at the core of contemporary modernity: the intense circula­

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 51

tion and the enormous desire of circulation of individuals who 
become, in words of Alberto Melucci, “nomads of the present 
time” (Melucci, 1989). Other migrants function according to the 
noria model, a principle followed, for instance, by a large number 
of Indian communities in Central America, who send individuals 
to the United States for a limited period and replace them imme­
diately when they return to their country. Yet others, following a 
very ancient model, are seasonal workers, who travel each year to 
a foreign country, especially to work in the fields or in vineyards 
—but, can one still speak of migrants when they only remain in 
the foreign country for some weeks a year?

Not all candidates to emigrate are illegal or clandestine, and 
the departure is not always an expedition or an adventure. People 
do not necessarily lack passport and visa. However, a very clear 
tendency is manifest in the whole world: the important thing is 
not always traveling to such and such country to earn a living 
and get established, it is being able to move, to have this possibil­
ity, to acquire access to mobility. In the old days, migrants were 
supposed to become either assimilated or integrated, or else focus 
on providing for their families in their home countries. The cur­
rent evolution undermines even more those integration theories 
positing migrants who do not want to relocate or be able to move 
permanently, but rather to find a place within either their society 
of origin or their society of arrival. In other words: in these days, 
when candidates to migration want to become citizens of a coun­
try of immigration, they prefer a passport to an identity card.

Change in Identities

From the Upsurge of Identities to Panethnicity 

Within the so­called societies of reception, it has become im­
possible to reduce migrants to the labels of either assimilation or 
integration, since they bring with them cultural, linguistic and 
religious differences that might resist dissolution, or even display 
vitality. Thus, since the 1990s in the United States, sociologists 

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abandoned the classical issue of the linguistic assimilation of mi­
grants and acknowledged, above all, the vigour of the Spanish lan­
guage and of bilingualism (English­Spanish, but not exclusively). 
Already in 1996, Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut proposed 
to break with the idea of a unique model and to distinguish three 
kinds of linguistic acculturation: “consonant” (English becomes 
the only language from the second generation on—which is the 
classical model); “dissonant” (which affects the children of poor 
and uneducated migrants: English is adopted, but acculturation 
shuts people up in poverty or in urban subcultures); and “selec­
tive” (upwards mobility is associated to bilingualism and bicul­
turalism) (Portes and Rumbaut, 1996). More recently, a study by 
April Linton and Tomas R. Jimenez has confirmed that “the forc­
es that could go against bilingualism are counterbalanced by con­
ditions that are favorable to it and establish it permanently in the 
American linguistic landscape” (Linton and Jimenez, 2009:986).

Moreover, migrants forge differences: alone or with others, 
they contribute to the general process of invention or produc­
tion of differences. These can either be confined to the private 
sphere, remain invisible and discreet within the public space, or 
on the contrary, be visible or even active, and claim, demand to be 
recognized. The production of differences within the societies of 
reception is not entirely due to migrants, it also responds to other, 
internal logics, it also derives from groups that grow or develop 
within the observed society. It is often the result of the encoun­
ter between internal and external logics, of the shared presence 
of various elements, some of them brought by immigration, oth­
ers born within the observed society, and yet others imported by 
means other than immigration. This can be seen particularly in 
the arts, for instance in music.

Cultural change does not operate in one direction only. By 
adopting and adapting the ideas or practices they discover in their 
society of reception, immigrants might very well act as mediators 
in the other direction and influence the culture of their society 
of origin. They not only maintain bonds with it, they also take 
part in its transformations: certain Indian villages in Mexico, for 

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 53

instance, change not only because of the economic contribution 
of the remesas, but also because of the intense movement of im­
migrants which influences the ways of life. Obviously, the digital 
technologies, the Internet, the “global” media play an important 
role in these mutual relations. And change does not necessarily 
imply progress, or modernization: emigration, for instance, can 
also have devastating effects on those who remain in the country, 
destroy fragile familial or societal stabilities, influence genre rela­
tions heavily in detriment to women, etcetera.

Some differences are heavy with victimhood memories. De­
scendants of immigrants bring to mind the genocide, massive 
massacres, slavery, slave trade, the colonization which victimized 
their ancestors; they demand acknowledgment of their histori­
cal suffering, which they occasionally relate to social injustice, 
racism or the discrimination they endure hic et nunc. Sometimes 
there are attempts at establishing connections. Actors who do not 
share the same history face the same struggle against racism or 
discrimination: West Indians, for instance, French descendants 
of black slaves can get involved in the same actions as immigrants 
arrived from Sub­Saharan Africa, whose ancestors could have 
contributed to the slave trade in the West Indies, but with whom 
they currently face anti­Black racism. In the same way, in the 
United States, descendants of Black slaves, “involuntary” immi­
grants according to the expression of John Ogbu (1978), distin­
guish themselves from recent voluntary Black immigrants arrived 
from Africa or the West Indies, even if they partly share their 
mobilization against racism regarding the Blacks. 

But not all differences, not all migrations necessarily have a 
historical relation to the observed society. In France, for instance, 
the migrations of the 1950s and 1960s came basically from the ex­
colonies of North Africa; currently, a significant part comes from 
the ex­colonies of Sub­Saharan Africa. But many immigrants also 
come from countries that do not have any relation to the French 
colonial past, like Turkey or China.

The upsurge of identities is a highly diversified phenomenon 
which cannot be reduced to just one logic. In some cases, the 

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religious, cultural, linguistic or other kind of identity is peculiar 
to one clearly defined group, while in other cases, it moves in­
dividuals of different origins. Mixture, interpenetration, mixed 
races, processes of hybridization and creolization participate 
as much in this general movement of identity assertion as the 
movements peculiar to very precise populations who do not mix 
with each other—American social sciences increasingly talk about 
“panethnicity”, which refers to the idea of a process whereby new 
identities are invented based on pre­existing ethnic forms. The 
classical analyses of Fredrik Barth (1969) prefigure this notion of 
panethnicity.

This phenomenon should also be considered in terms of the 
territorial spaces where it develops. In certain cases, differences 
belong in a national space, which constitutes their setting. In oth­
er cases, they are situated in a district, for instance, or in a city; 
it is also possible that they do not carry the burden of national 
frontiers and belong in regional or planetary spaces. Moreover, 
a difference often asserts itself locally, while at the same time it 
maintains close links to other parts of the world, or belongs in a 
global vision of its existence. The globalization of identities is a sig­
nificant phenomenon which translates, for instance, in the exten­
sion and multiplication of diasporas, or even in the contemporary 
expansion of certain religions, like Islam or protestant churches 
which develop in territories where they do not have a historical 
anchorage or where their upsurge is not associated to an impor­
tant cultural depth.

     
The Crisis of Integration 

Within the societies of reception, both the idea of assimilation and 
of integration become problematical. Nowadays, assimilation is 
not only increasingly abandoned, but also increasingly considered 
inadmissible and suspected of conveying certain racism: to ask 
of an individual to get rid entirely of his or her parents’ identity 
is the same as disqualifying this identity, considering it inferior, 
charging it with a negative judgement, with contempt, with re­

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 55

jection. The idea of integration is much more open and flexible. 
However, it is nowadays in a profound crisis. The main reason 
for this crisis is the distance separating the possibilities of integra­
tion and the reality experienced by those to whom it is proposed 
or imposed. When political actors or intellectuals establish inte­
gration as the desired horizon for everyone, when they summon 
the newcomers and their children to do everything possible to 
become integrated, they support a discourse that might become 
incantatory if society does not offer the possibilities of making it a 
reality. If society hinders integration with racism, discrimination, 
social injustice, exclusion, and an extreme precariousness, it is not 
surprising that those who make promises and ask immigrants to 
do what is necessary appear increasingly demagogical or irrespon­
sible, and will ultimately be left with repression, the police, and 
prison as the only forms of “integration”.

The political culture of the receiving society does not entirely 
explain the differences observable in the assimilation or integra­
tion of immigrants within a receiving society. Economic factors, 
together with racism in particular, can play a determining role. 
When the labor market, for instance, needs a large quantity of 
unqualified, uneducated workers, the situation could result in an 
isolation of the migrants who constitute it from the rest of the 
population, and thus in the weakness or absence of assimilation 
and even integration logics for them. Ultimately, immigrants are 
racialized so that their employers can exploit them better, which 
is very far from any integration goal. This happened in France 
during the “Glorious Thirties”, when “immigrant workers” were 
essentially single men living in shelters or sordid apartments, who 
were included for work, but culturally and politically excluded; 
at the same period, a similar logic applied to the “Gastarbeiter” 
in Germany, most of them Turks, rather well treated socially, but 
who did not have any perspectives of cultural or civic integration. 
The same situation prevails, nowadays, for Moroccans working in 
El Ejido farms in Spain, or for many Mexicans employed in the 
United States. Fear might play an important role for those who 
find themselves in a very precarious situation: workers without 

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papers feel so excluded, outside work, that they fear a negative 
reaction from their employers if they ask them for help to legalize 
their situation.

The crisis of integration1 is sometimes perceived through the 
idea of a crisis of integration models. Here are two spectacular in­
stances of this, events which ocurred a couple of weeks away from 
each other in 2005. In July 2005, the terrorist attacks in London, 
the first one of which was successful and the other ones frustrated, 
were carried out by actors who basically lived in the United King­
dom, it was not Islamists from the exterior, as in the case of “9/11”. 
From that moment, the way in which the United Kingdom treats 
its immigrants or minorities has been strongly criticized, and the 
British multiculturalism has been accused of having encouraged 
Islamist radicalization, particularly in London, where the mere 
evocation of “Londonistan” has worked since as a repoussoir. The 
“British integration model”, open to Muslim communities, let­
ting them act as they wish, not worrying about the upsurge of 
radical Islam in its territory, would be at the roots of terrorism. 
In France, during three weeks in October and November 2005, 
nightly riots shook the “suburbs” of all the national territory, with 
three to four hundred vehicles burnt down each night by young 
people, most of whom were the descendants of immigrants. The 
youngsters who burnt down cars in popular districts were express­
ing above all their rage and anger, they cannot stand speeches of 
integration being addressed to them any more, while at the same 
time they are unfairly treated by the police and the justice system, 
they are excluded, discriminated against. The fine promises of the 
republican French model, liberty, equality, fraternity, constitute 
an ideal they are summoned to develop, while at the same time 
these values remain inaccesible to them, the resources to attain 
them, for example school, are not available.2 

1Cf. article “L’intégration: un concept en difficulté” (Wieviorka, 2008). Cf. also 
the file “Modèles d’intégration et intégration des modèles? Une étude comparative 
entre la France et les Pays­Bas” (Wieviorka, 2009).

2For a comparison between France and the United Kingdom focused on these 
issues, cf. Danièle Joly (2007).

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 57

Thus, from a viewpoint internal to immigration societies, both 
the upsurge of differences and the lack of integration models 
question traditional representations and analyses of migratory 
phenomena.

Changes in Our Categories

Henceforth, we should think in an increasingly “global” way, as 
the title of a recent work by Catherine Wihtol de Wenden dedi­
cated to migratory phenomena confirms: “Human Globalization” 
—a title that reminds us we must end with the ethnocentrism that 
refers everything to our own State, to our own country, while at 
the same time there are all kinds of migratory flows. Considering 
the words we use, and therefore the categories that become ours, 
is enough to become fully aware of the recent evolution. We give a 
new sense to the world mobility, which becomes a value and refers 
in the first place to the international circulation of individuals.

Some words, some expressions refer to the treatment of immi­
grants within our society. Multiculturalism was invented in Can­
ada during the late 1960s and today the concept is already in 
crisis. Precisely in this country, the term proved to be unsuitable 
to settle the issue of Québec, on the one hand, and the problem 
of the “first nations” on the other, and withouth becoming ob­
solete, the expression seems to allow treating only some migra­
tion cases. Affirmative Action was invented in the United States 
in order to put a stop to the structural injustices suffered by 
Blacks, and later on other by groups, and although in France 
it is used to settle purely social issues and frequently according 
to the territorial mode of zeps (French for Priority Education 
Zones) and city’s policies, it is suspected by numerous critics of 
questioning the republican model only in favor of populations 
issued from immigration—an unfortunate expression. Moreover, 
there is an important problem here, the fact that in the field 
that occupies us today, we frequently lack the necessary words 
and expressions. For instance, what does Français de souche (“of 
French stock”) really mean in French?

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We have imperceptibly modified our vocabulary. In the old 
days, we spoke of immigration and immigrant workers, while 
nowadays we increasingly speak of migratory phenomena, mi­
grants, and work has ceased to be particularly related to this cat­
egory—migrants are actually the first to be excluded, fired, put 
in an insecure position. And the mainly unidimentional image 
of the immigrant worker of yesteryear has been substituted by a 
quite large diversity of figures: women, and not only men, elites, 
and not only proletarians, let alone, in France, Beurs and Beurettes 
(second­generation North Africans).

We take an increasing interest in the “global” dimensions of 
migrations, which not only needs new categories, but also opens 
unto new debates. Diasporas and diasporic phenomena are multi­
plying, one also talks of the Chinese and Indian quasi-diasporas, 
and a large number of countries have invented denominations, 
like in Japan, where Nikeijins is used to name Brasilians of Japa­
nese origin having chosen to live in Japan, or hyphenated terms 
like in the United States—where one can be Mexican-American, for 
instance. The economic vocabulary is also being modified, since 
there are important economic dimensions specific to migratory 
phenomena, starting by remittances—remesas or money transfers.

We increasingly associate migratory issues with human rights, 
and during the last twenty or thirty years a number of new ac­
tors have developed in the form of ngo’s and supranational in­
stitutions. Ultimately, migrations raise the issue of the tension 
between human rights, addressed by supranational actors, and 
the right of individual states. We must say that not even the inter­
national law has adapted yet to current realities. The 1951 Geneva 
Convention, for example, is not perfectly adapted when it comes 
to certain kinds of refugees or asylum­seekers, for instance for 
environmental reasons. More generally, migrants raise an issue 
that summarizes a famous phrase by Hannah Arendt, the “right 
to have rights”—in the country of departure, in those of transit, 
and in the country of arrival. 

Researchers discuss transnationalism, as well as the existence, or 
importance, of pan-ethnic and pan-religious actors. There is a great 

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W IEVIORK A/A WOR LD IN MOVEMENT 59

issue here: should we admit our tendency to form transnational hu­
man groups, defined neither by their nation of origin nor by their 
nation of arrival, but by another identity altogether, to become 
part of networks and spaces transcending nations? Or should we 
consider that states continue to have the upper hand regarding mi­
gratory phenomena, and that transnationalism is a category that 
only refers to borderline, marginal and temporary cases?

Finally, another implication for social sciences: migratory phe­
nomena have a paradigmatic value when it comes to say that 
now adays the important issues of the contemporary world require 
multidisciplinary approaches. The old divisions, for instance the 
one which left the receiving society to sociologists and the society 
of departure to anthropologists, do not work any more, and eco­
nomic, demographic, political and other issues combine and over­
lap in such a way that the joint mobilization of our disciplines has 
become indispensable.

References

Barth, Fredrik, 1969, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social 
Organization of Culture Difference, Oslo, Universitetsforlaget.

Grafmeyer, Yves and Isaac Joseph, 1979, L’École de Chicago: Nais-
sance de l’ écologie urbaine, Paris, Armand Colin.

Joly, Danièle, 2007, L’emeute - Ce que la France peut apprendre du 
Royaume-Uni, Paris, Denoël.

Laacher, Smaïn, 2002, Après Sangatte… Nouvelles immigrations, 
nouvelles questions, Paris, La Dispute.

Linton April and Tomas R. Jimenez, 2009, “Contexts for Bilin­
gualism among U.S.­Born Latinos”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 
vol. 32, July.

Melucci, Alberto, 1989, Nomads of the Present. Social Move-
ments and Individual Needs in Contemporary Societies, London, 
Hutchinson Radius.

Ogbu, John, 1978, Minority, Education and Caste: The Ameri-
can System in Cross-Cultural Perspective, San Diego, California, 
Academic Press.

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MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES, VOL. 6, NúM. 1, ENERO-JUNIO DE 201160

Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut, 1996, Immigrant 
Ame rica: A Portrait, Berkeley, California, University of Cali­
fornia Press.

Tarrius, Alain, 2003, La mondialisation par le bas, Paris, Balland.
Wihtol de Wenden, Catherine, 2009, La globalisation humaine, 

Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (puf).
Wieviorka, Michel, 2008, “L’intégration: Un concept en diffi­

culté”, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. 125, 2008/2.
Wieviorka, Michel, 2009, “Modèles d’intégration et intégration 

des modèles? Une étude comparative entre la France et les 
Pays­Bas”, Migrations Société, vol. xxi, num. 122, March­April, 
pp. 25­280.

Date of receipt: July 12, 2010.
Date of acceptance: September 9, 2010.

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