The 1980s saw the description and analysis of two historically dominant forms of international migration in France. The first, since the second half of the 19th century, has accompanied the industrial era, which captured the labor force - first in Europe, then in the colonies - and led individualsgrouped by employment basin to follow the path to republican integration (Noiriel, 1988); the second, since the French Revolution, has been the reception of identity groups driven from their nations by war and repression, who negotiated their individual and collective republican integration (Schnapper, 1982): these were the diasporas: the Israelite diaspora throughout the 19th century, followed by the Armenian, White Russian and Spanish diasporas after the secularization laws.. The 1980s, with their clear definitions of migration, were also a time of doubt about the integration of colonial "mobilized" immigrants and their children, the "beurs" (Boubeker, 1986).
These clear perceptions of the French state's actions and problems, and the subsequent call for social mobilization on behalf of the descendants of the "disappeared fathers", masked the emergence of a new form of migration initiated by the so-called "disappeared fathers" : large urban marketplaces set up international businesses reserved for the populations of the former colonies. In 1985 and 1986, I had the opportunity to investigate the Marseilles market square, in the historic central district of Belsunce, where over 5,000 North Africans (mostly Algerians) - the "disappeared fathers" - were living. The metropolis and the region supplied the merchants (350 stores), the Maghreb up to 700,000 customers a year, Italy car parts, Turks from Germany household appliances, Moroccans from Brussels industrial fabrics and carpets... The existence of this immense "underground" system inspired me to construct comprehensive notions capable of observing, describing and analyzing it: i proposed the paradigm of mobility (1989), uniting three levels of space-time characteristic of local, regional, national and international mobilities, the bearers of initiatives with sociological and anthropological scope, and that of circulatory territories (1993) of transnational extension and made up of economic and inseparably affective interactions between circulants and sedentary immigrants; finally, I resorted to that of moral area, transversal to the work of the Chicago School (Park) and its heirs (Hannerz, etc.).). In the 1990s, I identified the originality of the Moroccan trans-European circulatory territory, from Andalusia to the Italian Piedmont, Strasbourg and Brussels, and its innumerable business creations along these circulations. A similar phenomenon was initiated by Turkish migrants in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Belgium. Then, from the 2000s to the present day, I've been studying the discreet and original Euro-Mediterranean circulatory territory: cosmopolitan (Black Sea shores, Middle Eastern and Balkan) and linked to the industrial transnationals of South East Asia, via the Persian Gulf Emirates, it markets low-cost electronic products to poor and, often, immigrant populations. This is globalization from below (Portes, Tarrius), "dreamed up" by the transnational entrepreneurs of the SEA and carried out by poor migrants on European tours from home to home.
Europe's circulatory territories - ethnic in the case of Moroccan and Turkish, cosmopolitan in the case of Northern Mediterranean - have taken on the contemporary Middle Eastern exodus in a singular way, performing a "blotter" function, absorbing refugees along their routes.
