The Organic Ethnologist of Algeriani Migration

en "labor migration" and "settlement migration." The former always contains the latter in nuce and always eventuates in it: the individual departure of wage-seeking men gradually saps the "work of prevention and preservation" whereby the group seeks to maintain moral control over its members, and sooner or later the latter "abandons itself to family migration," which further accelerates the erosion of group boundaries.3Relinking emigration and immigration points also to the second pillar-proposition anchoring Abdelmalek Sayad's work: that migration is the product and expression of an historical relation of inter-national domination, at once material and symbolic. Immigration is a "relation from state to state" but one that is "denied as such in everyday reality" no less than in the political field (Sayad 1991: 267), so that its management may fall within the sovereign province of the receiving society alone, of its laws, administrative rules and bureaucratic dictates, and be treated as the "domestic" issue which it is not. Sayad (1979) shows, in the paradigmatic case of France and Algeria in the post-colonial and post-Fordist era after the flow of "migrant laborers" has been officially stopped, that the "negotiations" between countries that lead to international conventions and regulations concerning immigration are "bilateral transactions" in name only since the dominant economic power and former colonial ruler is in a structural position to impose unilaterally the terms, goals, and means of these agreements.4But there is more: every migrant carries this repressed relation of power between states within himself or herself and unwittingly recapitulates and reenacts it in her personal strategies and experiences. Thus the most fleeting encounter between an Algerian worker and his French boss in Lyon - or a Surinamese-born child and his schoolteacher in Rotterdam, a Jamaican mother and her social worker in London, an Ethiopian elderly and his landlord in Naples - is fraught with the whole baggage of past intercourse between the imperial metropole and its erstwhile colony. The relation of the emigrant to his homeland is likewise invisibly over-determined by decades of conflictual and asymmetric relations between the two countries he links: the "suspicion of treason, even of apostasy" that enshrouds him there (Sayad 1999a: 171) finds its root in the fact that emigration has shaken the very foundations of the social order, on the one hand, by corroding the established frontiers between groups in the sending society and, on the other, by affording the migrant and his kin an accelerated path of mobility but in an allochtonous hierarchy, one devoid of legitimacy in the moral and cultural codes of the originating community.53Sayad (1999a: 422-424) points out that, however virulent they may be in the society of immigration, the reactions of protest and opposition to migration are initially even stronger among the emigrating community, so strong indeed that they often make nativist and xenophobic resistance to foreigners in the receiving country superfluous. 4The same is true, mutatis mutandis , for the United States with Mexico and the Caribbean, or Germany with Turkey, Spain with Morocco, Japan with Korea, etc. 5This explains why public accusations against emigration typically "aim primarily and more violently at the emigrated female population and, more precisely, at the bodies of women," perceived as the ultimate repository and vector of the values of the group (Sayad 1984). 3A third proposition animates Sayad's tireless inquiries: like other key processes of group making and unmaking, migration has for requisite collective dissimulation and social duplicity. Emigration, and later immigration, operates in the way it does only to the extent that it continually mystifies and misrecognizes itself for what it is - or, to put it more precisely, the magical denegation (Verneinung) of the objective reality of migration is part and parcel of