This article studies the evolution of the use of smugglers to cross transit countries in the migratory trajectory, based on the case of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who cross Mexican territory to reach the United States, between 2009 and 2019. This strategy for reducing the risk of detention and return to the country of origin by Mexican immigration officials is studied from the Emif Sur survey applied to deportees by Mexican or US immigration authorities. With the quantitative analysis of the data this article studies the effectiveness of this strategy on the inspection’s avoidance, as well as the economic and social resources mobilized by migrants for this strategy.
This article examines the “ingredients” linked to life trajectories, characteristics of experiences, contexts and situations that may make experiences of discrimination expressible or inexpressible. It is based on qualitative interviews conducted with young adults belonging to so-called “visible” minorities, mainly students. The article highlights the importance of proof, the seriousness of the act, the legitimating body and the mastery of vocabulary as conditions for the enunciation of the discriminatory experience, as well as the role played by homophily in the choice of people to whom it is possible to talk about it. It is also because discrimination necessarily implies an act, that the word “racism” is more easily mobilized to speak about the experiences of stigmatization lived in everyday life. Finally, being born in France exposes one more to the feeling of discrimination and, at different times in one’s life, one’s parents’ attitude towards France can also influence these feelings.
Drawing on data collected as part of the Acadiscri survey, which places the focus on individuals’ lived experiences, this article examines racism and racial discrimination encountered by students in the university context. By demonstrating the pervasiveness of these phenomena in higher education, it highlights in particular the frequency of racial microaggressions and their repetitive nature. Yet, contrary to the hypothesis that racism within universities is primarily covert or implicit, the survey also reveals the presence of overt manifestations of racism. The article further analyses the role played by experiential trajectories and by students’ political socialisation in the process of recognising and becoming conscious of racism, as well as the importance of the context in which these disqualifying interactions occur, which challenge the egalitarian beliefs invested in the university institution.
What is the relationship between the experience of discrimination and discriminatory treatment? The question is addressed through a field experiment performed in the streets of Paris. In this study, twelve “testers” recognizable as Arabs, Blacks, and Whites approached pedestrians asking a small favor. After the field intervention, the testers were individually interviewed. The observations collected during the experiment refer to the behaviors of pedestrians and provide an objective measure of discrimination. The interviews focus on the experience of these behaviors on behalf of the testers and allow to document perceptions of discrimination. The study reveals the magnitude and systematicity of objective discriminatory acts that the discriminated person fails to perceive. These “false negatives” are by and large more frequent than the “false positives”, where the discriminated person perceives a discriminatory treatment that the objective measure fails to corroborate.
Drawing on in-depth interviews and life-history narratives with young French graduates seeking employment, and later with employed adults from the same cohort more than fifteen years on (N = 32), this article explores the relevance of the mesosociological level of organizations in shaping the lived experiences of racism and discrimination. Grounded in a structural understanding of racism, it combines frame analysis with the theory of gendered-racialized organizations to develop the concept of experiential space of racism, shaped through the intertwined relations of victimhood and whiteness. Emphasizing four positions—exemplarity, différance, denial of justice, and exit—the article highlights the importance of a relational understanding of the lived experience of racism, at the intersection of interactions with significant others and the relationship to the self.
This article examines the conditions for a critical phenomenology of the lived experience of racism. Drawing on the works of Frantz Fanon and Abdelmalek Sayad, it explores the methodological and theoretical difficulties raised by the description of racial oppression when it escapes subjective uptake and verbalization. Focusing on situations where oppression is not “experienced” in the sense of a singularized and appropriable event, the article examines the possibilities offered by theoretical narrative to reconstruct these experiences. Finally, it proposes a gradual conception of resistance, attentive to the pre-reflective forms of conflictuality at the heart of the experience, beyond the classic schema of “awareness”.
This research note reviews the study of racial microaggressions, understood as banalized forms of racism operating at the heart of everyday interactions. While extensively theorized in North American literature, the concept remains only marginally mobilized in French social sciences, despite its diffusion in activist spaces and everyday language. Drawing on a review of English academic debates and their reception within French social sciences, this note examines the scientific and epistemological issues raised by the lack of a stabilized concept in French literature to account for these interactions, while emphasizing the solid scientific foundation on which to build such analyses.
There is evidence that immigrants experience inequalities in health and access to healthcare. Based on qualitative research on access to healthcare for migrant women with an oncological disease living in Padua (Italy), this article analyses how they cope with difficulties through different types of social networks. Considering the challenges that migrant women face to their health, legal and economic status and the isolation they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article highlights the strategic role played by social networks and digital narratives of illness in coping with cancer and treatment.
Marked by the historical prevalence of internal circular migrations within the African continent, Niger has long remained on the sidelines of research on international migration. The emergence of transit as a normative category specific to the international governance of migration constitutes a major turning point, which is manifested through the implementation of a process of externalization and border enforcement of the Saharo-Sahelian space. While this border enforcement has contributed to the reconfiguration of migration routes and destinations, it is being challenged in the contemporary period by a context of multifaceted crises—including conflicts affecting the Sahel—, by migration approaches specific to neighboring countries (Algeria and Libya), and by the construction of a migration policy in Niger. These dynamics are leading to transformations in the regime of transit migration, which is now defined less by passage or blockage, and more by constrained circulations driven by multiple forms of violence.
