Monitoring international migration flows in Europe. Towards a statistical data base combining data from different sources

The paper reviews techniques developed in demography, geography and statistics that are useful for bridging the gap between available data on international migration flows and the information required for policy making and research. The basic idea of the paper is as follows: to establish a coherent and consistent data base that contains sufficiently detailed, up-to-date and accurate information, data from several sources should be combined. That raises issues of definition and measurement, and of how to combine data from different origins properly. The issues may be tackled more easily if the statistics that are being compiled are viewed as different outcomes or manifestations of underlying stochastic processes governing migration. The link between the processes and their outcomes is described by models, the parameters of which must be estimated from the available data. That may be done within the context of socio-demographic accounting. The paper discusses the experience of the U.S. Bureau of the Census in combining migration data from several sources. It also summarizes the many efforts in Europe to establish a coherent and consistent data base on international migration. The paper was written at IIASA. It is part of the Migration Estimation Study, which is a collaborative IIASA-University of Groningen project, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The project aims at developing techniques to obtain improved estimates of international migration flows by country of origin and country of destination

Governing immigrants and citizenship regimes: the case of France, 1950s–1990s

Does sustained and increasingly transnational immigration weaken the national character of citizenship regimes? This paper addresses this issue by examining French responses to immigration over a 40-year period. In spite of the changing character of immigration and changing state strategies, all governments throughout this period have sought to maintain the national character by making full access to rights contingent on one's conformity to national values and moralities. As the government made accessing rights dependent on conformity to national norms, the legitimacy of immigrant activists seeking to expand their rights has depended on their abilities to conform to the rules of the national political game. Resisting marginalization therefore requires the assimilation of the immigrants into nationally specific political cultures, which contributes to reinforcing the national character of citizenship regimes. By examining the particular case of France, the paper aims to show how top-down and bottom-up processes by states and activists work in different ways to keep the nation at the center of citizenship regimes in spite of the ongoing and very real challenges presented by transnationalism and globalization

The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

A researcher or a journalist trying to compare the situation of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States and in France immediately confronts a crippling obstacle. The concept of ‘ethnic and racial minority’ as such is not used in France. This is not simply a matter of vocabulary –something the French typically like to argue about; the problem rather lies in the very incomparability of populations that one is talking about. Many of the categories that do exist in political discourse and public debate can of course be found in statistics. But there are no data describing the situation of minorities in France that could be compared with those produced in the United States. This state of affairs in French statistics – gathering has been the subject of major criticism for some 20 years now; it has gotten to the point that it has triggered a controversy of rare violence between those that would like to see statistics take into account the diversity of the population and those who denounce the danger that such statistics might pose of ethnicizing or racializing society. The media focus on the contentiousness of this debate has been such as to sometimes lose sight of the very existence of discrimination and the flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place