The learned, the political and the popular : what vocabulary for migration ?

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As an introduction, the lecture explores the lexicometric corpus of the Ngram Viewer application, which tracks the relative frequency of expressions found in millions of texts scanned by Google (publications of all kinds, excluding the press). In this way, we can follow the evolution of migration vocabulary since the end of the ^18th century. While "émigré" emerged during the French Revolution and enjoyed a strong resurgence around 1825, "immigré" didn't really take off until after 1968, and grew steadily until the mid-1990s. It supplanted "travailleur immigré", which began to decline after 1976.

" Migrant ", on the other hand, initially refers to people in the process of migrating, but is often used as a noble substitute for "immigré", due to the pejorative drift suffered by the latter (in contrast to the English migrant, which takes on negative connotations over time). Since the Second World War, and with the exception of an interruption in the 1980s, "migrant" has been gaining ground in France, to the point of joining "immigré", reflecting a growing focus on new arrivals. Whereas "exilé" and "proscrit" evolved in tandem throughout the 19th^century, with peaks around 1792 and 1825, "exilé" escaped from 1968 onwards, while "proscrit" collapsed.

The UN's Population Division (and not the Haut Conseil à l'Intégration, as it is commonly known) is responsible for an international definition of "immigrant" applied by statistical institutes the world over, according to which an immigrant, from the point of view of the country of destination, is a foreign-born person who has crossed the border and settled for at least one year. If the information is available (which is increasingly the case), nationals born abroad to expatriate parents are excluded from the scope, so that only those "born abroad" are included. The lecture went on to consider the implications of this international definition for both the "first generation" (born abroad) and the "second generation" (born in the host country to an immigrant parent). Whether or not they acquire the nationality of the host country (in France, over 40 % are now French), they continue to count for the demographer, without which any international comparison of career paths would be impossible.

The discrepancy between the scholarly use of the term "migrant" or "immigrant" and its popular (and often pejorative) usage cannot be resolved by censoring the vocabulary. Demographers and statisticians who conduct surveys know that asking respondents whether they are "immigrants" is out of the question, so negative are the connotations of the term in current usage (political, media and ordinary). The method adopted consists in asking basic questions about people's background (country of birth, nationality at birth, country of habitual residence) and then inferring immigrant status from all the answers.

Until the late 1980s, INSEE and INED used the terms "foreigner" and "immigrant" interchangeably. The introduction of a rigorous distinction between the two concepts, solemnly announced by the management of both institutes in 1991, caused controversy. In a 1999 article, Alexis Spire denounced the promotion of the "immigrant" category as a "stigmatizing" act of "social magic" in the service of a policy aimed at reinforcing "common sense", with "the backing of certain agents in the scientific field". The conspiracy logic of this explanation, which focuses on the French case and the role of a few key figures, poses a problem of scale: it fails to take into account the universal use of the notion of "immigrant" in UN, Eurostat and OECD publications, which is the usage we will be following in this lecture - the only one that allows us to re-establish the orders of magnitude of the migratory phenomenon.