Sciences Po’s Research Magazine Analyses Migration from Multiple Angles

Migration, Diversity, & Mobility, the latest November 2020 issue of Sciences Po’s research magazine, COGITO, covers a timely and important subject. Sciences Po’s Migration and Diversity group, which brings together Sciences Po researchers from multiple disciplines, contributed to the publication. The articles culminate in a multifaceted analysis fitting for migration’s diverse forms. Overall, the publication compiles research that sheds light on migration issues of the past and present, so as to better understand them in the future.

Discover the issue’s highlights here:

Arrested in Tehran in June 2019, and then sentenced to five years in prison on the basis of false accusations, Sciences Po Research Professor Fariba Adelkhah has long studied a wide range of travels. In this introductory article – “Rereading Fariba Adelkhah: on the road from Teheran to Damascus” – the magazine presents one of her works, in which she reveals the unexpected dimensions of a pilgrimage of Iranian women to Damascus. Her anthropological perspective uncovers the social significance of the details of daily life.
With his article “Migration and integration: global cities in the Mediterranean in the 18th century”, Sciences Po History Professor David Do Paço presents the ways in which foreign communities have integrated into Mediterranean cities in the modern era. He shows that beyond the collective factors – ‘Nations’, families, and religions… – other dimensions in micro-history contributed to the integration of immigrant populations.
For more than fifty years, transnational travel, mainly by air, has grown exponentially. Last March, the global spread of Covid-19 abruptly suspended travel. In his article “Before the Deluge: the irreducible growth of human mobility in the world before Covid”, Sociology Professor Ettore Recchi draws on recent surveys to outline the geography of our travels over the past few decades and explores the prospects for their recovery.
Legal expert and Sciences Po doctoral candidate Louis Imbert’s contribution – “When Constitutional Law Imagines Foreigners” – is a cultural and comparative analysis of North American and Colombian law relating to foreigners. It presents two radically different legal policies: one based on the principle of exclusion, and the other based on the duty to show solidarity. Both of which have significantly impacted our perception of immigrants, as well as their daily lives.
Between exclusion and integration, it is also important to consider partial policies that neither accept nor refuse immigrants, but rather integrate them into the labor market, turning a blind eye to the illegal practices of recruiters. This is what Lucas Puygrenier [FR] exposes in his article, “Migrant labor: policies serving production systems”. The article draws on a study of the employment of refugees and asylum seekers on the island of Malta.
The impact of migration on the labor market is endlessly controversial: do immigrants form a needed labor pool, or is their competition harmful to “native” workers? This question divides both public opinion and economists. In their article on “Migration, Wages and (un)Employment”, Sciences Po researcher Hélène Thiollet and Economics Professor Florian Oswald present many empirical studies while highlighting the elements to consider in order to form a perspective that better reflects reality.
Citizens are increasingly mobilising to end the discrimination and systemic racism affecting immigrants and their descendants. In response, the far right is pointing to anti-white racism. To analyse the relevance of this latter concept, Research Professor Daniel Sabbagh delves into the foundations of racism - rather racisms - in his article "Is There Such a Thing as 'Anti-White Racism'?”. By focusing on racisims’ mechanisms and actual consequences, he sets the record straight.
Highlighting the limitations of research that focuses exclusively on the migration policies of Western states, Hélène Thiollet calls for reinventing research on migration policies in her article “Unlocking Migration Politics: Gaps and Biases in Scientific Debates”. She suggests that more studies focus on countries of the South as migration destinations. More importantly, she argues for the consideration of migration as both the subject of migration policies and one of the constitutive phenomena of nation states.

Given the vastness of migration and its significance for the peaceful development of societies, many Sciences Po research projects focus on it. The magazine presents the approaches and methods from a selection of recently-begun migration research projects, including the politicisation of Asian minorities in France, the establishment of statistics at the European level, the media treatment of migration “crises”, the role of mobility in intercultural relations and technological progress, and the outsourcing of migration policies, to name a few.

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