Migrants’ connections within and beyond borders: insights from the comparison of three categories of migrants in France

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-1990s, the concept of transnationalism has been increasingly used and discussed. Some authors have contested its novelty, arguing that all types of migrants, including internal ones, tend to remain connected to their home place. In this paper, we provide new quantitative evidence to show that migration, be it internal or international, entails a similar sort of connectedness between places. Using a nationally representative survey carried out in France (TeO, N = 21,761), we systematically compare the transterritorial connections of international migrants, French migrants born abroad and French migrants born in overseas territories. Our findings show that all migrants maintain transborder ties, with particular intensity among French overseas migrants. Owing to border effects, oversenas migrants exhibit higher levels of sociopolitical and “re-migration” connections and are less engaged in economic relations. The results also show that transterritorial connections are affected by similar determinants across the three categories of migrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Transterritorial connections
• transnationalism
• migration
• international migrants
• overseas migrants cross-border ties

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank ERS editors and reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Roger Waldinger for useful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Finally we would like to thank Bernard Corminboeuf for his help with the final touches on the figures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Cris Beauchemin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0722-6569

Notes

1 The notion of transnationalism explicitly refers to migrants’ connections between nation-states. The term is thus inappropriate to name the set of multisited ties and/or activities that migrants have within the borders of the country where they live. Translocalism, less common in the literature, entails a local dimension, referring to specific places rather than broad regions (Hoerder 2013). As our variables do not refer to specific localities but rather to regions or countries, we prefer the term “transterritorial”.

2 Although related to international migration, the comparison between regular and irregular migrants illustrates this idea that ease of movement fuels trans-territorial connections. Vickstrom (2014) has shown, for instance, that irregular migrants (who cannot circulate) are in a situation of “blocked transnationalism”. Their “territorial confinement” has a significant negative effect on the probability that they will remit or invest at home. Similarly, it has been shown that irregular migrants are less likely to return to their home country than their documented counterparts (González-Ferrer et al. 2014).

3 La Guadeloupe, La Martinique, and La Réunion are the home départements of by far the largest numbers of overseas migrants in metropolitan France.

4 More details on the survey and questionnaire can be found at http://teo_english.site.ined.fr/. The full methodology is also presented in Beauchemin, Hamel, and Simon (2018).

5 Descriptive statistics on these groups are available in tables A1 and A2 (supplementary material available online).

6 The exact wording of the questions is available in Table A3 (supplementary material available online).

7 The detailed methodology can be found in Beauchemin and Safi (2015).

8 Table A1 can be accessed as supplemental data.

9 Figure A1 can be accessed as supplemental data.