"International Migrations: a Global Issue" Catherine de Wenden, CNRS research director: CERI - Sciences Po. -It is hard to talk about migrations without talking about borders since they both exist jointly. For a long time, borders had a different configuration from what we know nowadays. Borders can bring order but also disorder, especially when we consider international migrations. We tend to think that migrations bring some disorder within the order of the states that control their borders and for which border control is an essential component of national sovereignty. For a very long time, when states were being formed, they mainly handled the exit of their territory. Meaning that the most important thing was to keep the population since it was the source of economic wealth, feeding the people, especially peasant populations that would cultivate the land. It was also a tax wealth since, when states wanted to raise taxes, they had to keep their population on their territory. It was also a military wealth since it was thought that the more soldiers one had, the more one was powerful to fight on the international stage. The right to leave was thus very precisely controlled. Very few people were allowed to leave. Feudal rights were binding the peasants to the land in their relation to their lord. Those who had the right to leave were the elite, ambassadors, traders, people who moved beyond borders, but also the undesirables, a small minority which, from time to time, was expelled as such or which willingly left these territories, sometimes illegally. So it was difficult to leave home. On the other hand, it was quite easy to enter other places. Particularly as of the 19th century when transportation developed and when we moved from sailing boats to huge steamboats that had a large capacity and that had to be profitable. Touts were travelling all around the world, mainly in Europe, to try and make populations leave for peopling immigration lands such as the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia. It was easy to enter these lands, even when there were sanitary controls or sometimes limited qualification controls. In some lands, it was so difficult to attract people from beyond borders that they were populated with convicts, convicted criminals and prostitutes. The initial history of Australia started this way regarding its peopling. So it was difficult to leave home and easy to enter somewhere else. Nowadays, it is the other way around. The right to leave and cross borders has been generalized while it is difficult to enter somewhere, even more so when leaving the South to reach the North. How did this process progressively invert itself? It is the result of a whole history we will try to study. First, the border issue nowadays is an extremely sensitive topic. For a very long time, there had been no debate regarding borders, except for neighborhood confrontations. To illustrate this controversy, I will oppose two books. One written by Michel Foucher who talks about an obsession with borders and who says, describing Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, that there has never been so many kilometers of borders. On the other hand, Régis Debray, in "Eloge des frontières", says that borders are a way to express identities and that without them, our whole world would dissolve itself. So it is an extremely controversial topic. For a long time, borders have been the expression of the political entity of states through boundaries. Let us not forget that in order to write the history of borders, one has to get back to geography, paradoxically. Maps had to be drawn and shown. The Third Republic in France, through the maps of Vidal de la Blache, showed young French students, who sometimes did not know on which territory they lived and above all with whom they lived, the importance of these borders to mark out territories. It is even the Germans who coined, regarding the French, the term hexagon to illustrate this staging of the borders through cartography and geography lessons. So maps have been a military tool but also an educational illustration of borders. These borders were mainly confrontation places. First, because there were fears of intruders from the outside, but there was also the idea of conquering beyond borders. Boundaries have always been important for nation-states that were looking to have a rather precise handling of their territory. On the other hand, many great empires had rather blurred borders at their edge. In desert regions, the border was not very well known. Populations who lived in these territories also did not really know to which actual territory or state they belonged. These are rather different approaches to borders. But the most important thing about this idea of borders is that it is a tool for order. Each state tries to handle its borders, its population, within the scope of a territory. This is even one of the features of nation-states. Migrations mainly add a kind of transgression in this reality since a part of the population is not on the state's territory, particularly refugees, people who are not there anymore but who also do not want or cannot live there. Migrations create many forms of transnationalism. One crosses borders, builds networks that are not bi-state networks but transnational, beyond borders, through economic, cultural, social and trade exchanges built by the migrants. There is thus a network logic and not a territory or a border logic anymore. Today, this disorder, if I may say so, is a growing phenomenon since we are in a more fluid world where everything circulates and where borders are greatly shaken, heckled, by this migration phenomenon.
