"A necessary evil"? The problematization of family migration in French parliamentary debates on family migration, 1974-1993

This chapter by Saskia Bonjour and Massilia Ourabah offers a brief genealogy of the problematisation of family migration in France, based on an analysis of 195 plenary debates and parliamentary questions from the period 1974-1993. In particular, it examines when and how politicians mobilized gender and family norms to problematize the way in which migrants ‘do family’. Bonjour and Ourabah argue that representing migrants as doing family ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is a powerful way of placing migrants inside or outside of the national public, social and cultural order. They show how conceptions of family and conceptions of nationhood intersected in parliamentary discourses to render transnational families as ‘outsiders’ or ‘insiders’ to the French nation, which in turn justified increasing or restricting their family migration rights.

The chapter was published in 2022 in A-M. D'Aoust (Ed.), Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship, and Rights, Rutgers University Press. It is available open access via the UvA depository.