One cannot write on the sociology of immigration without, at the same time and by that very fact, outlining a sociology of emigration. One country’s immigration is another country’s emigration. The two are indissociable aspects of a single reality, and one cannot be explained without reference to the other. The two dimensions of the phenomenon can be separated out and made autonomous only as a result of some arbitrary decision. The caesura is introduced by a division of competences, interests and political stakes between political partners who are situated, with respect to one another, in a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship. On the one hand, we have emigration, just as there are countries, societies and economies of emigration and just as there is, or should be, a (political) power, a state and an emigration policy (on the part of the state), and also – why not? – a science of emigration. On the other, we have immigration, just as there are societies and economies of immigration, very definite immigration policies and, bound up with all that, a science of immigration. As an object that has been divided between political powers rather than disciplines, and between divergent social and political interests on continents that have been separated by a frontier that divides emigration and immigration, the migratory phenomenon cannot be fully understood unless science mends the broken threads and puts together the shattered fragments. This must be done by science and not by politics. Science may even have to resist stubborn political attempts to maintain the division.

In this domain (perhaps more so than in any other) science is objectively subordinated to politics¹ because of the imposition of a problematic that belongs to the social order (in all its forms: demographic, economic, social, cultural and, above all, political). As a result we are obliged to investigate the social preconditions for the possibility of a comprehensive science (a science that can borrow from all the disciplines of social science) of the migratory phenomenon by looking at its twin components: emigration and immigration. To be more specific, we are obliged to investigate the social preconditions for the emergence of certain questions that exist as social problems only because they are constituted first as objects of discourse and only then as objects of science. One of the peculiar features of sociological thinking about emigration and immigration is that it must also, and necessarily, be self-reflexive. In no other social context is sociology so closely bound up with its own sociology as it is here. The sociology of emigration and immigration is inseparable from the reflexive attitude that consists in investigating, in connection with every aspect that is being studied, the social conditions that made it possible to study it, or in other words the constitution of the object under consideration as an object of study and the effects this has on the aspect of the study that is being made. The first conclusion to emerge from this reflexive attempt to truly construct the social object known as immigration (and/or emigration) as a true object of science is that any project undertaken on this basis is at once a social history of the double phenomenon of emigration and immigration, and a social history of the discourse on the phenomenon in question – here, as with many social objects, the discourse on the object is itself part of the object and must be integrated into the object of study or must itself become an object of study. The discourse on emigration or immigration can be pronounced in turn from the immigration point of view and in the society of immigration, and from the emigration point of view and in the society of emigration. Any attempt to construct immigration as a true object of science must, finally, be a social history of the reciprocal relations between these societies, of the society of emigration and the society of immigration, of relations between emigrants and immigrants, and of relations between each of those two societies.

Without going into details about the conditions that now make it possible to ask a number of new questions about, and to arrive at a new understanding of – which remains to be communicated – the migratory phenomenon, one can only note the emergence of previously repressed questions about emigration and immigration. The many new themes, discourses and studies include, for example, the problematic that goes by the name of the ‘cost-benefit theory of immigration’. This is the product of the extension to ‘cultural’ matters of a problematic that was originally constructed just for the study of the economic aspects of immigration (and, to a lesser degree, emigration). It may have the beneficial effect of contributing to the elaboration of a ‘total economics’ of the migratory phenomenon which would also include the economics of the non-economic and particularly those aspects that are conventionally described as ‘cultural’.

Because in many ways it is so reassuring, one has to be deliberately myopic to accept and reproduce the reductive definition of the migratory phenomenon that implicitly describes it as being nothing more than the mere displacement of a labour force. It is as though we had, on the one hand, a (relatively) surplus labour force – with no questions asked as to the reasons for that surplus, or about the genesis of the process that made this surplus available (for emigration) – and, on the other hand, jobs that are available – with no questions asked about the mechanisms that make these jobs available to immigrants. No doubt we will have to wait for the removal of the determinations which, in practice, mean that all we can see of such a vast object is its immediate or phenomenal function, which is also an instrumental function, in order to bring out the many other functions and qualities the ‘instrumentalist’ vision helps to mask. This operation of dissimulation is the very precondition for the constitution and perpetuation of the phenomenon.

But once they outlive certain social conditions, emigration and immigration eventually betray their other dimensions, and especially their political and cultural dimensions, which were initially concealed. No doubt the initial function of immigration has to become blurred, or to cease to appear to be the only function that, in both practice and theory, devolves upon immigration, before its other implications – and there are all kinds of them – can be revealed. This appears to occur when immigration ceases to be exclusively about labour, or in other words something that affects workers alone – assuming that there can be such a thing as the exclusive immigration of labour – and is transformed into immigration of families (or of settlers). We thus establish an artificial divorce between, on the one hand, the immigration of labour, which appears to concern only workers (who represent no more than an input of labour power) and which poses only labour problems, and, on the other, an immigration of settlers, whose meaning and effects are of a different order, whose implications are much more far-reaching, and which creates multiple problems on such a scale as to affect all spheres of society, and especially what we might call the cultural and political spheres.

To that extent, to immigrate means to immigrate together with one’s history (immigration itself being an integral part of that history), with one’s traditions, ways of living, feeling, acting and thinking, with one’s language, one’s religion and all the other social, political and mental structures of one’s society – structures characteristic of the individual and also of society, since the former is no more than the embodiment of the latter – or, in a word, with one’s culture. This is what we are discovering today, and we are surprised (not to say scandalized) by it, even though it was predictable as soon as the first act of immigration took place – in other words as soon as the first immigrant arrived. But although we might in theory have predicted it, we refused to do so because, if we had, immigration would not have come into being and gone on existing in the form that we know it. This is, in part, the meaning of the contemporary discourse on the cultural contribution or cultural effects of immigration, whether or not we delight in them or deplore them, praise them or denounce them – which is another way of recognizing them, a form of admission as well as a way of including these contributions, sometimes as ‘costs’ and sometimes as ‘benefits’, in the great bookkeeping exercise inspired by the presence of immigrants, which now includes things that do not come within the remit of accountancy itself (i.e. of the economy in the strict sense).

Reaching this point requires, however, more than changes within the phenomenon of immigration, within the immigrant population, and the correlative transformations that have occurred in connection to immigration. There must also be a sort of general cultural disposition (in other words, a disposition that can be transposed by the individuals or groups of individuals who possess it, to all spheres of existence) that is broadly shared, at least as an assertion of principle from which there is no reason to draw any practical implications. This disposition goes by the name of cultural relativism. It is a cultivated attitude – on the part of people with a cultivated relationship with their own culture – towards the culture of the others whom they thus constitute as an object of culture which they can then appropriate and which can enrich their own culture. The relativist profession of faith states that ‘one culture is as good as another’, just as one language is as good as another or even just as one religion is as good as another (but with more reservations, except on the part of the odd sceptic or agnostic, who tends to view them all with the same indifference or to subject them to the same negation). It applies, however, only to some pure and ethereal realm of cultures (or languages or religions). Now that relativism has been generalized and vulgarized or, to a certain extent, secularized (or in other words now that it has left its own territory or the territory for which it was designed, namely the epistemological sphere), it has, sociological realism notwithstanding, been turned into a sort of absolute (or dogma) that tolerates no relativization.

One could write a whole social history of cultural relativism. One could write a history of the social conditions of its invention, its diffusion and the effects it produces, or in other words a history of stakes and struggles that were and are struggles over the legitimate definition of the notion of culture. Every social class that is also a cultural class claims to define culture by appeal to its own standard or to contest, at least in the case of culturally dominant classes, the definition that the hegemonic culture (i.e. those who are culturally dominant) imposes. But in this struggle between unequal cultural partners, is not the insistence with which a culture that claims to be ‘popular’ tries to negotiate on equal terms with the culture it objectively recognizes as the culture of reference a way of paying homage to that culture? That is the whole meaning of the quarrel, which is never entirely lost, between ‘popular culture’ and ‘cultured culture’ (i.e. academic, dominant culture), which is ‘culture’ tout court, without any further qualification. The implicit confrontation between endogenous ‘French’ culture and ‘immigrant’ culture – the ‘cultures of origin’ which are complacently redefined as ‘cultural contributions’, (Berque 1985) or the ‘culture in creation’, which grafts onto the imported substratum borrowings imposed by the context of immigration and already in part adopted prior to immigration – is turned into an issue not so much by the immigrants themselves as by the society of immigration as it asks itself about its own cultural components. The confrontation is, it would appear and subject to all the distinctions that characterize the sui generis situation that immigration creates in this respect, no more than a paradigmatic variant on the old and still ongoing conflict between competing cultures.

Nor is emigration what we want it to be, or what we believe or pretend it to be so that it can occur and continue in such a way that we can accept it without a bad conscience and, ultimately, in the mode of the obvious. Emigration is not simply the export of labour power. It is not the export of a sort of labour force that is available for use, and that is available for use because it is not being used at home. Yet that is how emigrants are defined, first as unemployed men, and then as unemployed men who emigrate so as to cease being unemployed: nothing more and nothing else. Emigration and immigration are social mechanisms that must fail to recognize themselves for what they are in order to become what they must be. But, with the passage of time, immigration finally admits, and admits to itself, what it really is, namely something more than and different from the mere emigration (or defection) of a certain quantity of labour power; it eventually reveals all its other dimensions, all the other aspects it had to conceal in order to perpetuate itself. Even though, mutatis mutandis, the same causes always produce the same effects, the unmasking that occurs with respect to immigration in the society of immigration helps to provoke or accelerate the correlative unmasking of emigration within the society of emigration. A copy of a discourse about the object and theme of immigration is thus gradually installed in all spheres of society and even in scientific discourse about the phenomenon of emigration.² The two discourses, which echo one another, are homologous because, ultimately, they are both products of the same schemata of thought and the same categories (applied to symmetrical objects) of perception, appreciation and evaluation of the social world and in this case, to be more specific, the respective worlds of emigration and immigration.