-I think we will begin this lesson. Dear François Héran, are you here? Yes? Pierre Rosanvallon will, in a few moments, explain all the excellent reasons that led the Assembly of Professors to elect you to the chair of Migration and Societies. The conference for the 2016 academic year, Migration, Refugees, Exile, made it possible to listen to you with your paper From the Migrant Crisis to the Crisis in Europe, Demographic Approach to Migration Policies and Reception Policies, to listen to you. Many here, who have shared this privilege, probably remember it. You reminded us that, beyond its obvious historical universality, the migratory phenomenon takes a wide variety of forms, and that the generic term migrant actually covers a considerable number of situations. Economic conditions, geopolitical situations, religious or ethnic persecutions, climate change, the simple desire to move, fantasies of roots that should be found again, all these are stimuli that encourage migration, if not wandering. I'm only talking about international migration, and not about migration within borders, to which you devoted your anthropology thesis, in Andalusia, I believe. This heterogeneity of motives and situations is enriched by the heterogeneity of distinctions between nations. Those whose reception is part of their traditions, or even an essential element of their constitution, is rather the case of France. And for those for whom it is an exception dictated by emergency situations, we would then think of Germany. In short, what appears to be absolutely necessary today, beyond political or humanitarian mobilisations, is a scientific approach, which establishes facts on the basis of which one can reason about a complex phenomenon, far from fantasies, which is born of ignorance or bad faith, and which gives rise to all the possibilities of ideological manipulation. The phenomenon of migration is not new, its amplitude, like the forms it takes, can vary according to the times and regions of the world. But the inhospitable folds are of no interest, neither to those who move nor to those who receive. Without forgetting that the one who receives today is sometimes yesterday's guest, and that no one can believe his sedentary lifestyle, as long as he wants it. It is then easy to grasp it: analysing these phenomena allows us to understand what we are, and to prepare ourselves for what is to come. This is urgent and requires multiple knowledge. The Collège de France is therefore pleased to welcome this evening a philosopher, an anthropologist and a demographer, a practitioner of three disciplines, essential to the intellectual mastery of a phenomenon, which since Sapiens left Africa, has been part of the human adventure. Dear colleague, welcome you to the Collège de France. -A student at the ENS in rue d'Ulm, François Héran was admitted to the agrégation de philosophie in 1975. But like others in his generation, some of whom are now his colleagues here, he made the choice to direct his life as a researcher in social sciences. For him, it will be first and foremost anthropology. His postgraduate thesis will thus be devoted to Earth and Kinship in Andalusia. After this work on the agrarian bourgeoisie of the Seville region, he will travel to the Bolivian Andean highlands to study the impact of the agrarian reforms then in progress. On his return to France in 1980, he was recruited by the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED). He was almost immediately placed at the disposal of INSEE to work in the Living Conditions Division, where he reoriented his research in a more sociological direction. This period will also be a period of in-depth training in statistics and demographic techniques. These new skills were recognised by his appointment as head of the Demographic Surveys and Studies Division of INSEE, a position he held for five years from 1993 to 1998, before returning to his parent institution, INED. One year later, he became its director, a position he held for more than 10 years, until 2009. It was there that he carried out all his subsequent research until his appointment at the Collège de France in the autumn of 2017. This very brief recap of François Héran's career gives us a glimpse of what characterises him intellectually. He is a social scientist, in the strongest and broadest sense of the term. He did not move from one discipline to another, but he explored and deepened a global understanding of the social world, which made him constantly cross disciplinary boundaries. Thirty years after his first steps as an anthropologist, he published in 2009 a master book in dialogue with Lévi-Strauss and Granet, Figures of Kinship, a Critical History of Structural Reason. At the same time, he has also been one of the pillars of the long-running Revue française de sociologie. He has written articles on the statistical basis of sociology, or the notion of habitus, which have been a reference. Patron of the INED, he opened the institution to the approach of historians and economists alike. This attention to multidisciplinarity has resulted in the production of a large number of articles devoted to the methodology and critical history of the social sciences. At the same time, however, he has always worked tirelessly, wherever he has been, to establish increasingly rigorous and relevant databases of figures. It is with this demand that he has contributed to redesigning, within the framework of INED, the major databases on the trajectories of migrants. The issue of migrants has thus been at the heart of his work for the last twenty years, from a multidisciplinary perspective. In a field overwhelmed by passions and prejudices, a pioneering field for the emergence of what we now call alternative facts or post-truth, he has always worked resolutely at the head of INED to, and I quote: "look further, and try to ensure that we take into account, first and foremost, the basic demographic data and the major groundswells that define population dynamics". He has thus published reference works, to help ensure that facts replace fantasies in this field. He has also played a decisive scientific role in pointing out the inanity of certain public policies when they were decided and implemented under the pressure of preconceived ideas. His arrival at the Collège de France coincided with the setting up, under his responsibility, of a Grand Institut Scientifique des Migrations, which will coordinate the work of more than 200 researchers in all disciplines. With him, we can surely hope that scholarly work will thus be able to serve the more enlightened citizenship that these great questions call for, in order to resist the temptation, so strong, of the abyss. I now give the floor to François Héran. -Mr. Administrator, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. By deciding in March 2017 to create a Chair in Migration and Society, the Assembly of Professors of the Collège de France made a strong gesture. You have not only welcomed within these walls the scientific study of migration, you have integrated the fact that migration, beyond the spectacular episodes that polarise attention and raise passions, is an ordinary component of the dynamics of societies. I will open this lesson with a cursive evocation of four professors from the Collège de France, who have blazed trails in social demography, and for some in the approach to migration. Going back in time, Alfred Sauvy, Louis Chevalier, Robert Montagne, Maurice Halbwachs. Alfred Sauvy was the first. The first demographer to have taught within these walls, appointed in 1945 at the head of the Ined, which I myself had the privilege of directing. He held a chair of Social Demography at the Collège de France. In 1983, he invited the young recruits of INED, of which I was a member, to his 85th birthday. I can still see him taking a run-up of several metres to blow out his candles, and I remember one sentence from his speech: "Immigrant workers contribute to my pension". One of his favourite targets was the vision of fixed quantity employment, which, if shared, would have been enough to reduce unemployment. Jean Tirole is right to point out that a variant of this fallacy is the belief that immigrants "take" the work of the French. Sauvy had a utilitarian view of migration flows. He dreamed, so to speak, of a demographic policy on migration, several versions of which he delivered not in his lectures at the Collège de France, but in various publications, which I will examine in my lecture in complete freedom. Alfred Sauvy had been introduced to the Collège de France by Louis Chevalier, author of an unusual book, Classes Laborieuses et Classes Dangereuses à Paris during the first half of the 19th century, who was worn out by Fernand Braudel for having favoured sources such as serial novels, news items and police reports. But thus, Chevalier, conservative as he was, managed to instil fear in the well-meaning in the face of the invasion of "barbarians" and "nomads" from faraway lands such as Brittany, Auvergne and Savoy, unassimilable proletarians, quick to commit crime, obviously of a different kind, but whom Paris would absorb in the downturns of its neighbourhoods. One cannot read these pages today without thinking of the panic that nowadays grasps libellists who are worried about the strangeness of migrants and dream of a homogeneous society. A disciple of Lyautey and founder of an institute for the training of executives on Muslim soil, Robert Montagne was elected in 1948 to a chair of colonial history. He launched investigations into the migration from the south of Morocco to the ports, before being taken in France by the Metallurgical and Mining Union. In a chapter offered to Lucien Febvre, he gives a fine description of the channels of mutual aid and survival woven by Kabyle workers and urges employers to take into account the family dimension of their journey. His work reminds us of the colonial origins of much migration. If so many people from the Maghreb come to us, it is first of all because we have "invited" ourselves to their homes, and in the harshest of ways. A great figure, finally, is that of Maurice Halbwachs, elected to the chair of Collective Psychology in May 1944 and who died in deportation a year later without having been able to pronounce his inaugural lesson. Fascinated by "social morphology", he had followed Alfred Lotka's efforts to mathematise demography, but was wary of a "pure science" of populations explaining demographics by demographics. In his view, population facts were inseparable from social facts, and the migrations of collective representations that make up states, in which Halbwachs was a forerunner of which we can still claim credit. But it was not the memory of these pioneers that led your assembly to entrust me with a chair in Migration and Societies. You first reacted to the European crisis of the refugees from the East who were trying, at the risk of their lives, to reach Europe. At a time when France was reluctant to mobilise, you joined forces with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Secretary of State for Research to set up the national emergency reception programme for scientists in exile, PAUSE. Then you wished to act in another direction by organising a symposium on exile, before creating a chair to place current events in the context of demographic and social dynamics. For you have understood: if the breakers fascinate us, we must grasp the waves of the ocean floor, measure the ordinary pulsation of the ocean. To fulfil this mission, you have called on my insights. I am aware of the honour you do me and I admire the audacity of your wager. May the Assembly of Professors receive the expression of my gratitude for the youth and work thus granted to me, with a special mention for my mystagogue, Pierre Rosanvallon. Allow me also to see in your decision a tribute to the two institutions to which I have long linked my fate: INED, the spearhead of demographic research in France, to which I have given much, and INSEE, the flagship of public statistics, which has taught me a great deal. I am indebted to Henri Leridon, whom you elected to the chair of Sustainable Development for 2009-2010: 30 years earlier, he had welcomed me to INED in his department, a school of rigour, a haven of freedom. I am grateful to INED's International Migration and Minorities unit for having carried out, against all odds, the surveys Trajectories and Origins, TeO, and Migration between Africa and Europe, Mafe. Finally, I would like to salute the fine team that surrounds me at the head of the Migration Institute, a project carried out by seven institutions, hosted by the Collège de France while awaiting the opening of the Condorcet campus and for which the first call for membership received more than 200 applications. How can we not be touched by the presence this evening of so many colleagues, friends and relatives? Immigration is an ultra-sensitive subject that is the subject of fierce debate. It is difficult to deal with it calmly because our vision of the phenomenon is plagued by many contradictions and tensions. It is by mentioning four of them in turn that I will outline the orientations of my chair. International migration profoundly affects societies of origin and societies of destination. "Immigrants", "migrants", "immigrants"? I am not unaware of the reservations, even hostility, that this terminology arouses, first and foremost among those concerned. My first lecture will be devoted to the critical history of the vocabulary of migration, caught between three usages: administrative, scholarly and popular. Allow me to retain the scholarly definition recommended by the United Nations Population Division a long time ago. The immigrants that a country registers at a given moment in time are those "foreign-born", who have crossed the border with the intention of settling for a period of at least one year, regardless of their subsequent access to the nationality of the country. This definition therefore includes both foreigners and foreign-born. Contrary to popular belief, naturalisation does not erase the status of immigrant. More than 40% of immigrants in France have acquired French nationality, but once naturalized, they continue to count for the demographer. What does this "first generation" weigh in the population of France? If we extrapolate the recent trend for 2018, around 10-11%, or around 7.5 million people. The "second generation", for its part, is not an immigrant. It includes descendants born locally of one or both immigrant parents, i.e. 13% of the population in France, approximately 8.5 million people. Nearly a quarter of the population linked to immigration over one or two generations is a lot. This is twice as many as in France in the 1930s, which was prey to the Great Depression and xenophobia. We find this order of magnitude in countries of old immigration: 23% in Germany, 22% in the Netherlands, 26% in the United States, again adding first and second generations together. Taken from censuses or population registers, these figures count residents at a given moment, the migrant stock, the stock of migrants, we must use this crude language in demography. The other approach measures the annual flow of new entrants and provides us with important information: Europe, especially the European Union, is a large continent of immigration. Since 2014, the European Union will receive proportionally more migrants than the United States: this is a denial of the prejudice that some countries are by nature immigration countries, while Europe would only be immigration countries defending itself, by outbreaks, during a crisis or a war. In the United States, Canada or Australia, the pioneering conquest soon gave way to the "nativist" withdrawal, the second generation wanting to lock the gate crossed by the first. Having acquired a mentality of insiderism, it blocked the new outsiders, who were considered too Latin, too Oriental, too Jewish. Already in 1882, fear of the "yellow peril" had led the United States to restrict Chinese immigration, before banning it completely in 1888. American nativists would eventually impose the discriminatory quota system from 1923 to 1964. Some 40 years later. It consisted of reducing the range of national origins of new entrants to that which had prevailed two censuses earlier, in 1900, when immigration was predominantly English and German-speaking. Quotas filtered entries so well that, in the last decade of their application, it was quite effective, with France receiving proportionally more immigrants than the United States. If Congress put an end to quotas after the assassination of John Kennedy, it was not by following the natural slope of a "nation of immigrants", but under the impetus of the civil rights movement. Let's dispel the myth: no country is by nature open or closed to migration. France has been a country of immigration since the mid-19th century, unlike its neighbours. Exhausted by the wars of the Revolution and the Empire, Malthusian before its time, which was the cause of Sauvy's despair, who spoke about it a lot in his lectures at the Collège de France, it registered hardly more births than deaths and lacked labour to develop mines, railways, ports, factories. The birth boom from 1946 to 1974 was not enough: France remained a country of immigration, lacking workforce to carry out the tasks of reconstruction and growth. What about the origins of immigrants in the EU? They have diversified, with increasing contributions from Central Europe, Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. In France, however, the relative share of the Maghreb and the rest of Africa in the immigrant population: has increased sharply: following the drying up of Spanish and Portuguese flows. It rose from 20% in 1975 to 43% in 2013, a phenomenon to which public opinion is sensitive. Settlement" migration or "replacement" migration? In our country, immigrants who settle in the long term, about two thirds of them do not replace the existing population, they add to it, as do their children. And, little by little, they become part of it. Economists have amply demonstrated that its effects on the state budget and social protection remain neutral or marginal, and that immigration above all brings people and expands our economy. It also allows many natives to escape from the hardest jobs, cleaning, construction, agricultural work, security, personal care and to climb the social ladder. The share of both generations in the total population is now such that many questions based on the distinction between us and them become absurd. As much as it makes sense to evaluate the expenditure of the state or communities to welcome and train newcomers, it is pointless to try to put a figure on what immigration brings us or costs us over several generations, as some essayists have claimed to do by inventing budget distribution keys according to origins. What would be the point of calculating the net cost of a quarter of the population for the remaining three quarters? It's as if a sibling group of four people, including one adopted abroad, wanted to put a figure on what the latter costs the other three. Still on the theme of a minority but strong presence, I have long been emphasising a paradox that is often misunderstood: migrants can make a strong contribution to the population of a country without bringing massive flows. While Germany recorded record immigration peaks in the 1990s, and Spain and Italy in the 2000s, France's migration profile has remained relatively moderate and stable since the mid-1970s: except in the very recent period. The number of new non-European migrants admitted to stay each year hovered around 190,000 between 2005 and 2014, with an increase due mainly to students. It took the "crisis" of 2015-2017 for the figure to rise to 262,000 in 2017. Proportionally, this annual influx represents an additional population that was long limited to 0.3%, before recently rising to 0.4%. Demographers are accustomed to saying 3 and 4 per mil. As the OECD reminds us, there is nothing massive about migratory flows in France; it is their accumulation over time that ends up producing a massive change. In Le Temps des immigrés, published in 2007, I summed up the country's migration dynamics in one phrase: "not a massive intrusion, but a lasting infusion". If the infusion lasts for decades, a fortiori since the 19th century, and even if about a third of the immigrants leave, it ends up modifying the origins of the population, while favouring a progressive mixing over the generations. Such observations expose us to incredulous reactions that quickly turn into an indictment. How many times have "official" demographers been accused of deliberately minimising immigration, of cultivating an omertà of figures, of torturing the data according to their ideological impulses or, worse still, of forging them in the manner of a Lyssenko. A variant of these reactions can be found in a recently published essay in Gallimard's "Le Débat" collection. According to the author, the calculation of a non-European immigration rate of 0.3% is worthless, as it brings a flow closer to a stock, l and would obscure the fact that once immigrants have settled, they still have children. And to accompany this verdict with a moral condemnation: demographers making such calculations use a "dishonest" process - they are "complacent" towards immigration. The charge is a tough one, but it misses its target. For the basic indicators of demography are precisely based on the principle of relating a flow to a stock. Birth rates, fertility rates, marriage rates and death rates cannot be calculated any other way. If you relate the number of births in the year to the population in the middle of the year, you divide a flow by a stock and you get ... a birth rate. The births of the next generation are obviously not included in this calculation - they are another statistic. It would be wrong to take a flow for a stock, but there's nothing dishonest about relating one to the other: that's the basis of the demographic calculation. When the time comes, I will look into these lessons in demography given by amateurs who are more passionate than enlightened. They always end up slipping from the technical argument to the trial of intent. It does not occur to them that one can seek to take an objective measurement of migration without being guided by some hidden interest. What can be opposed to this kind of suspicion? This simple profession of faith: we do not have to be for or against immigration, nor do we have to be for or against ageing, for or against the acceleration of trade. Whether we like it or not, we have to deal with immigration, as it is so deeply rooted in our societies. Hence the title of the book I published in La Découverte: Avec l'immigration. This committed neutrality does not only concern researchers. The debate on immigration will gain in maturity if we refuse the binary logic of "for or against", of "right-thinking" versus "politically incorrect", of angelism in the face of the principle of reality, and other rhetorical pincers that kill the debate instead of animating it. We do not seek to minimise the figures on one side to magnify them on the other. Nor do we deny the growth of a tree by following its growth rings from one season to the next, nor do we deny the cumulative effect of moderate flows over decades. But, let's face it, an accretion mechanism producing its effects in the long term is disconcerting to the layman and requires pedagogy. Second tension: migration, a spontaneous mechanism which is not self-evident. One would expect to see the flow of migrants from poor to rich countries, following the steepest lines from overpopulated to underpopulated areas. But if fluid mechanics held the key to migration, should it not take away the majority of the world's population? It does not. Having compiled censuses from around the world, the UN has come up with this surprising result: out of the 7.550 billion inhabitants of the planet, some 258 million live abroad, i.e. only 3.4% of the world's population. This figure can be increased to 4% to take account of undeclared migration, and to 5% if we consider former migrants who have returned home. This is only an order of magnitude, but it speaks for itself: 95% of the world's population has never migrated abroad. If migration is a spontaneous mechanism, it is not self-evident, as if necessity alone drove people to tear themselves away from their native soil. We think of Baudelaire's Voyage de Baudelaire: Should we leave? Or stay? If you can stay, stay. Leave, if you have to. To shed light on this mechanism, I propose to return to Adam Smith's founding treatise, The Wealth of Nations, in which we witness the birth of a first theory of migration. Reading the classics is valuable in that it takes us back to the time when dilemmas were posed soberly. In the British Isles, Smith deplores, goods move more than people: It is a truth of experience that man is, of all baggage, the most difficult to move. The fault lies with the Poor Law, which forbade poor people to offer their work outside. Every parish had its poor and had to keep them, giving them meagre assistance. Hence artificial labour shortages, as they say, poverty traps. Smith pleaded for workers to be allowed to freely prospect the labour market. This would allow them to rebalance wages between rich and poor countries. In his view, in short, the best migration policy was no migration policy at all. Smith favoured neither origin nor destination, but the gap between them. There is no problem of methodological nationalism, as they say today. The only worthwhile "draught" is the difference in earnings expectations between the two poles of migration. Many researchers will calculate a net difference. For the costs induced by multiple factors must be deducted: distance, transport, taking information on employment and housing, insufficient training, lack of knowledge of the language, etc., not to mention the barriers to entry. However, as long as the gain is positive, migration becomes interesting. Geographers and economists, from Ravenstein to Sjaastad via Zipf, Stewart, Tinbergen, will start by developing gravity models. As in the law of universal attraction, they equate cities or countries with unequal mass bodies that tear each other out of matter. The number of displaced migrants is proportional to the product of the populations present and inversely proportional to their distance. Subsequently, these models will be absorbed in regressions inspired by human capital theory. What happens to the demographic dimension of these models? Population size becomes a measure of employment opportunities weighted by unemployment rates. Age underscores the ability to invest in education and gain experience. And gender will increasingly become a major concern. How do spouses negotiate decision-making at each stage of the journey? To what extent do women migrate to escape male domination, early marriage, selective abortion of girls, excision, etc.? What role do informal or specialized brokers play in marriage migration? Is the fact that women often have to go through the formal channel of family reunification a barrier to their access to the labour market? The list could be extended. The notion of distance is becoming richer in the models. It is initially interpreted as an indicator of the cost of transport. Then we discover its social dimensions: such as linguistic, cultural and religious distance, but that the links forged with the former colonial metropolis help to shorten it. We understand later that the cost of information is lightened by two forms of 'social capital', the diaspora already in place and, henceforth, social networks. All in all, the migrant integrates these constraints and his strategy consists of "relocating" his human capital in order to take better advantage of it. However, this capital must be transportable from one universe to another, homologated and non-discriminatory. Incidentally, these models, if they are well conceived, reconcile Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Boudon: the assets and habits of migrants differ according to their origins and background, but understanding the strategies presupposes an understanding of what individuals have been sensitive to in this universe of choice under strong constraints. Duly enriched by individual and context variables, the new models reveal the selective nature of migration. This is a result that is constantly being verified: it is not the poorest who migrate the most. Michel Rocard imagined that "all the misery in the world" might come to France if we were not careful. In reality, only a minority of the populations of the South seeks to migrate to the North and not the most miserable as we have still seen in the distribution of Syrian exiles. The question of why 95% of the world's population does not migrate can therefore be answered in two ways. Firstly, by invoking demography. The global average expatriate rate of 3.4% is pulled down by the world's most populous countries, those with more than 150 million inhabitants. India and China concentrate 37% of the world's population, but only 10% of international migrants: only 1.2% of Indians live abroad and 0.7% of Chinese. These are very low figures. These are planets so massive that they retain most of their populations in the game of internal migration. This does not prevent the rare emigrants from forming large diasporas abroad, given the initial numbers. The same applies to Nigeria, Brazil, the United States or Indonesia: none of their diasporas exceeds 1 % of the population of the mother country. But size does not explain everything. With 15 and 21 million inhabitants, Chad and Niger do not have the retention power of Nigeria, which has 191 million people. Yet their diasporas remain weak: less than 2 % of their population. How can this be explained? It is that Chad and Niger are too poor for emigration to really take off. This must be taken into account when attempting to extrapolate future migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. UN projections indicate that this region of the world, with its high fertility rate, is expected to increase from 640 million people today to 2.1 billion in 2050, or from 13% to 22% of the world's population. Should we conclude that myriads of sub-Saharan migrants will overwhelm Europe by then? A team from the International Monetary Fund has looked into this question and answers in the negative. First modelling the drivers of sub-Saharan migration to OECD countries, it shows that they have the same reasons for migrating as the rest of the world. But human capital is too weak in this region of the world to displace more than a small minority. Sub-Saharan Africa is among the regions of the world that emigrate the least, with less than 2% emigrating, far below the Maghreb-Middle East region or Southern Europe. More than two-thirds of the emigration is to another sub-Saharan country. And if she leaves the region, it is a very selective emigration. In a second step, the IMF team applies this set of factors to the population sizes projected by the UN for 2050. The result is a sharp increase in the number of sub-Saharan migrants in OECD countries: from 6 million to 34 million, and their share in the population of these countries from 0.4% to 2.4%. This is a sharp increase, a sixfold increase. But 2.4% is still far from an invasion. Forecasts based solely on the principle of communicating vessels forget that international migration is competing with regional migration and internal migration. The same question also arises with regard to climate-induced migration, which is not necessarily international. This is a vast subject on which I will try to take stock of the available observations and projections. So what can be done? We will not conjure up the spectre of sub-Saharan population growth by trying to dissuade the elites from migrating to the North. We must, of course, combat climate change, but without giving up the fight to intensify actions for women's education and reproductive health south of the Sahara, in order to meet the demands increasingly attested in surveys in this region: they want to postpone the age of marriage, which is extremely early, and to have the means to effectively space births. Third tension: the asymmetry between the right to emigrate and the right to immigrate. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, recognises the right to emigrate in Article 13-2: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country". But no text sets out the symmetrical right: to immigrate to the country of one's choice. The Belgian jurist Yves Carlier, referring to the film by Theo Angelopoulos, spoke of the "stork's not suspended step": I have the right to lift my foot above the border, but not to put it back on the other side. An asymmetry denounced by supporters of a universal right to mobility. Let's take up the question again by going back over the genesis of the right to emigrate. One of its first formulations is due to a great figure: the Dutch jurist Hugo de Groot, alias Grotius. In 1609, at the request of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, Grotius published a memoir, Mare liberum, which was to become a reference for a long time. It was still published until the 19th century. Against the Portuguese and English claims, it justified the right of any country to trade freely on the seas of the globe "the sea is a great market", which excludes enslaving the people living along its shores. He cited the Law of the People, drawn up by Francisco de Vito in Salamanca in the 1530's. But in 1625, Grotius' situation changed : exiled in Paris under Louis XIII, he became sensitive to the individual dimension of the right to migration. In his treatise On the Law of War and Peace, a monumental and magnificent work, recently republished. It reactivates the principles of the Ancients: "No one is forced to remain a member of a State in spite of himself". Better still: "Everyone is free to choose the state of which he wants to be a member." Except that this double right, Grotius points out, is not absolute: one cannot evade the duty to defend the besieged homeland or the obligation to settle one's debts. Restrictions that are still valid and which were considerably extended in 1966 by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted in New York: States may restrict by law the right to leave one's country if it is "necessary to protect national security, public order, public health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others", which opens the way to all kinds of abuses. Jean-Jacques Rousseau agrees with Grotius at the end of Book III of the Social Contract: he expressly quotes him: "Yes, everyone has the right to leave their country to regain their natural freedom", but, Rousseau adds, it must not be a case of desertion. And, second restriction: if emigration is an option, it must not take away the citizens' right to question the fundamental laws of the country, not even the social pact, the social contract itself. This position can be clarified by reformulating it in the terms of Albert Hirschman's famous triad: exit, voice or loyalty. Faced with a failing or illegitimate state, I have three solutions: leave, protest or submit. But if the right to leave has to pay for the prohibition to remain in place to challenge the regime, there is neither voice nor loyalty: the exit solution is reduced to the constraint of exile. A right that is granted to you without freedom of choice is of no meaning. Adam Smith, in turn, puts the freedom to migrate back into a significantly different set of options. The destitute, he writes in The Wealth of Nations, have four options for escaping poverty: escape from the parish to which they are assigned, stay on welfare, go into delinquency to get by, or die. without Smith specifying whether the latter option is to wait for death or to commit suicide. In short: emigration, welfare, crime or death. In this grim array of possible escape routes, migration remains the least desperate option, the only rational solution that can improve one's lot and increase general prosperity. It is the only one that deserves to be established as a right. John Locke had followed this path a century earlier, but in deriving the right to leave one's country from the right of every subject to self-determination, as libertarian philosophers today, sometimes extremely conservative, are opposed for this reason to any control of migration. Adam Smith's reasoning has the merit of suggesting that impediments to mobility perpetuate poverty, whereas the right to migrate freely allows people to escape desperate situations and improve their condition. The interplay of options he deploys takes on particular significance in the light of the tragedies that nowadays punctuate the attempts of so many exiles: when the horizon is blocked and assistance is helpless, the right to migrate becomes a matter of life and death. It is not, as those who want to castigate the mirage of migration repeat, a "quest for the Eldorado". No: it is a rational, sensible project, driven by the will to succeed, to "salir adelante", as we say in Spanish, in order to obtain those goods that we all vitally need: a perspective for the future, a minimum of consideration. But, however strong it may be, Adam Smith's reflection ignores the political alternative evoked by Rousseau, namely the right to challenge a failing regime on the spot without being forced into exile. What Rousseau ultimately reminds us is that emigration is often only a way of "voting with one's feet" in the fight against tyranny or the negligence of regimes that abuse their citizens. It's a way to vote with one's foot. A striking example of this is the mass emigration of Venezuelan graduates. Here are the results, published last month by the Argentinean authorities. You can see the extraordinary brain drain that Argentina is benefiting from from Venezuela, which has decided to open its doors wide to them. And not to impose heavy asylum procedures. How can this haemorrhage be qualified? Economic migration or migration as a refuge? The official categories are fading away. One could speak of a "mixed migration of economic refuge". If the expression did not have the defect of erasing the political dimension of this migration. When the exodus of graduates becomes so massive, it is worth denouncing the regime in place. But this example also suggests that the world's elites have a de facto right to mobility, as Catherine Wihtol de Wenden has often reminded us. You have a better chance of getting a visa, all other things being equal, if you're rich, European, Christian or have the right phenotype. We will have to explore without a priori the counterfactual scenarios that many development economists have constructed on the benefits of free movement of all factors, 7both people and goods. What would be gained by replacing development aid with such dubious returns with the issuance of visas facilitating North-South travel? Why not organise experiments in this area that are subject to evaluation? Do bilateral agreements that open borders to varying and often arbitrary degrees already offer "natural experiments" that could be exploited scientifically? The economic literature is developing on these questions, which is then exploited by researchers in political science or ethics. I will try to review this work and invite its authors to discuss it. But we are well aware that there is no consensus on opening borders. Some fear the uncontrollable identity reactions that would be provoked in the West by the "world's misery", the unlikelihood of which we have seen, and others hope that the lifting of borders will liberate the growth of countries of origin while benefiting the countries of destination. But, if the worst is not certain, is the best even more so? Prophets of doom do not hold the keys to the future, nor do prophets of happiness. The coordinators of the UNESCO collection on the Scenario without Borders, a reference book, warn us: "It is an illusion to pretend that we know what would happen if borders were to be opened, too many factors play a role". Abolish borders? We still have to clarify which borders we are talking about. Assuming that the walls are knocked down and controls are lifted, many barriers still stand in the way of limiting access to long-term residence, work, many trades, housing, voting and citizenship. Everyone understands the need for border controls for security reasons, provided that the measures are proportionate to the risk, carried out under judicial supervision and regularly evaluated. The problem, in my view, is not so much the regulation of flows as the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of decisions to grant visas. There comes a time when the choice of an option for or against openness is a philosophical and moral one. Should we follow Kant or Bentham? There is the classic dilemma between the Kantian imperative of unconditional respect for the dignity of the human person and the Benthamian calculus, which seeks to maximise the well-being of the maximum number of people, at the risk of sacrificing the weakest. On the one hand, a morality that is indifferent to the consequences, riveted on its duty. On the other, the calculation of a "common utility", whose results may vary according to the economic and geopolitical situation. On examination, I see that neither of these two ethics clearly pleads for or against the opening of borders. The Kantian approach is confronted with the need for reciprocal agreement from host societies, while the Benthamian approach will accept a certain degree of openness as long as the cost/benefit balance is positive. It is better to loosen this dualism by trying to move the benthamian sliders as best as possible, while at the same time securing Kantian pawls. Let's not get trapped by false dilemmas. Some would have us believe that we are doing politics when we close borders and morality when we open them. Strong minds on one side, beautiful souls on the other. No: both options are both political and moral. We remember the Yom Kippur war... so tensions of useful migration or migration in its own right. We remember the Yom Kippur war and the "first oil shock" of October 1973. The price of oil having quadrupled in a few months, the German and then French authorities decided to put a clear stop to labour immigration in order to curb the economic recession and the rise in unemployment. Immigration continued for other reasons: this was the case in Spain. We see that in 1973, 1974, instead of emigrating, they were forced to return home, and emigration stopped. Emigration, especially in France, continued for other reasons. Family reunification, marriage migration, international students, humanitarian reception, not to mention illegal stays awaiting regularisation. But with the major consequence that migration flows have become disconnected from the economic situation. In the 1960s, migrants were sent back without mercy in times of recession to be rehired when the economy recovered. Since 1974 already, this coupling has been over. In the old immigration countries, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands... Many policies seem to ignore this disconnection. They still cherish the dream of migratory flows "strictly adjusted to the needs of the economy", as was the case in several of the programmes defended during the presidential election primaries. However, the only countries that have recently illustrated this model in coupling the migratory and economic cycles are the new immigration countries, including the Gulf States, but also those of southern Europe, Spain in the lead. In the 2000s, the latter massively employed a low-skilled labour force for public works, construction, agriculture, tourism and care for the elderly, until the subprime crisis burst the real estate bubble and the migration bubble in turn. In the countries of former immigration, on the other hand, the decoupling of flows with the economy has been all the more clear-cut since the second half of the 1970s, since it coincided with a shocking discovery: immigrants are no longer just workers, they are subjects of rights. Together with his spouse and children, he forms a strange entity called the family. Hitherto discreet actors come into play: the highest judicial bodies, administrative justice, European institutions, but also associations providing legal support to migrants. Together, from the end of the 1970s onwards, they identified the consequences of the legal principles enshrined in international conventions: the right to a normal family life, the right to marry a foreigner who will join you, the right for the child to live with his or her parents without having to pay for schooling, including the consequences of their irregular situation, the right to take refuge in the event of persecution, to which is added the very open possibility of enrolling in a foreign university. In France, it was the Gisti ruling of 8 December 1978 that marked this family turning point in migration law, with the new interpretation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights taking over in 1991. In the United States, the decision in Plyler v. Doe was taken on 15 June 1982 by the Supreme Court. The American political scientist James F. Hollifield theorised this change in the treatment of migratory flows, in the United States as in France: the logic of rights now prevails over the logic of the market. The logic of the family life unit prevails over the logic of the individual worker, which, it is worth noting, is in the direction of a more egalitarian treatment of genders and generations. It remains to be understood why these developments are not observed to the same degree across Europe. France offers the example of a country where the regulation of migratory flows largely escapes companies as it escapes politics. The vast majority of the 220,000 non-European migrants who obtain a residence permit every year are not there to rejuvenate the age pyramid or to fill labour shortages, they come here because they have the right to do so. Direct labour migration remains residual less than 10% of residence permits and it is indirectly that new entrants enter the labour market. Knowing that one cannot lead a "normal" life without working, the right to work becomes a consequence of the right to family life, and not the other way round. Under these conditions, on which register does the regulation of migration depend? On an economic policy? Very little. On a demographic policy? It doesn't exists. It is essentially the product of a legal policy conducted by a set of public and voluntary actors who are resisting, as best they can, the onslaught of a fourth form of policy, the most fearsome, the policy of opinion, which it must always be remembered is not synonymous with democracy, because it skips the crucial stage of deliberation, which must be duly informed. The approach to migration is being dragged hue and cry by other antagonisms, which I will leave aside. They communicate with the precedents without totally overlapping them: tension between political voluntarism and the discovery that past demographic events still hold sway; tension between the idea of the migrant-victim suffering the effects of globalisation and the migrant-strategist challenging sovereign states; tension between the control of flows, which is a priority for the state, and the policy of marginal integration, between the integration model and the assimilation model, and so on. How can all these contradictions be resolved? By pushing a single cursor to the limit? By cautiously falling back on the "golden mean"? By practising the double discourse of a "firm but humane" policy, or the opposite? Scientific research as I see it is too attentive to the complexity of things to indulge in these facilities. It is too torn by doubt, not the doubt that paralyses, but the doubt that spurs. Between cold immobility and voluntary drunkenness, there is a space to act with full knowledge of the facts. We are condemned neither to angelicism nor cynicism, we have to wield on several cursors at the same time while applying certain pawls, such as respect for fundamental rights. To conclude, I will look back at the European crisis of 2015-2016, moving from a subjective to an objective assessment. We all remember the twists and turns of the "European migration crisis": the appeal of the German Chancellor, the reluctance of her European counterparts, the closing of borders, the attacks... As far as France is concerned, we now have testimonies from direct collaborators or attentive observers on the management of the "migrant crisis" at the top of the State. They describe the paralysis, the evasion, the desire "to evacuate problems without really knowing how", the tetanization in the face of the rise of populism, the refusal to oppose pedagogy to demagogy and, finally, the use of a single compass: the acceptability of the measures by the public. In other words, a policy of opinion. Rousseau left us a scathing aphorism on this subject: Dominance itself is servile when it is opinion-based; for you depend on the prejudices of those whom you govern by prejudice. I hear the objection: subjective, biased, partisan narratives... So let us objectify the facts. What protection did Europe actually give to the exiles who knocked on its door from the summer of 2015 onwards? Eurostat, the European statistics office, compiles the asylum applications processed by each country, as well as the decisions to grant or not to grant legal protection. Let's add up the verdicts of first and second instance, and add to refugee status subsidiary protection of a humanitarian nature. If we look at the absolute figures for 2016 as a first step, Germany comes well ahead, so I am forced to cut the end of the bar. With 755,000 cases, of which 445,000 result in a positive decision. France is far behind, in second place in terms of the number of cases, and in fourth place in terms of positive decisions. Can it be counted among the most generous countries in Europe in terms of asylum? The problem, as we have understood, is that it is absurd to compare absolute figures between countries of different sizes. We have to reason in proportion, for an equal population. If we take a per capita indicator, i.e. the number of positive decisions in favour of asylum seekers per million inhabitants, the order of the table is reversed. It is illegible, I will go back up to the top of the graph, on the left. Sweden is ahead of Germany, with 7,000 positive decisions per million inhabitants, Austria goes back up, while France falls back to 16th place, well below the average, 530 against 1,400. Now, who can argue that, for an equal population, it would have less reception capacity than Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, which for their part have granted twice as much protection? On this issue, Europe has not been divided, it has been torn apart. The two extremes, Poland and Sweden, are in a ratio of 1 to 700, even though these two countries are separated by a sea inlet. Such discrepancies are extremely rare in the social sciences. We can see the diversity of factors that disperse behaviour. At the top of the table are rich countries such as Sweden, Germany, Austria, Norway and Switzerland, which are thought to have more resources for their hospitality than others. But if we weight our indicator by GDP, which I have not done here, the reclassifications observed are not enough to upset the positions: France, whose GDP is slightly higher than the European average, remains in 16th place. Two island-states, Cyprus and Malta, rise to the top of the table. Situated at the forefront of the migrants' trajectory, it is difficult for them to escape the Dublin II regulation, which assigns the processing of the asylum application to the first country in the Schengen zone where the applicant has been registered. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, is stepping up its withdrawal: it is taking advantage of its peripheral position as far away from the theatre of operations as possible. This makes all the more remarkable the active hospitality of the Scandinavian countries, which are also quite a long way from this theatre. It is a subject of meditation for geographers attentive to "spatial justice". I am thinking, for example, of Bernard Bret's book. For when it comes to migration, the regulations of the European Union do not compensate for the unequal exposure of the various states to the migratory flows from the South and the East. They deepen existing spatial inequalities. How can we explain the position of Southern Europe, where asylum seekers receive little protection except in Italy and Greece under the pressure of the Dublin regulation? Less attractive economically, Portugal, Spain and Greece have in common that they have long been countries of emigration, sources of exile and not lands of asylum. When, in the 2000s, they abruptly switched from emigration to immigration, to the point of regularising undocumented migrants by the hundreds of thousands, they did not need to equip themselves to deal with the asylum application: regularisations were sufficient to absorb it. The countries of Central Europe remained hermetically closed to any asylum application, due to at least three factors: the persistent isolation during the communist era, which did not accustom the population to rubbing shoulders with migrants from the South in order to rebuild the economy; property indicated here by red dots. The absence of a colonial past likely to maintain migratory chains; and the obstinate maintenance of a national narrative that brandishes Catholicism or Orthodoxy as a banner against Islam. The example of the protection granted to asylum seekers by European countries is a good illustration of the power of revealing a numerical balance sheet. It is difficult, after that, to be fooled by propaganda discourse on the "generosity" of a particular country in the matter of asylum. As far as ordinary migration is concerned, the statistics on residence permits by motive reveal a system of practices and preferences that is not very well known, which varies from one country to another, without always being the result of a deliberate policy. The Franco-German comparison shows a near inversion of priorities, with Germany mobilising its charitable strike force to receive exiles in an emergency, while France, in its republican legalism, takes seriously the "family aspect" of rights to continuously receive ordinary migration. This totally fragmented picture lacks a central element, the preferences of the exiles themselves. This is the argument of the French authorities: what can we do about it if they have chosen another country? Without exaggerating the exiles' access to communication technologies, which deserves precise analysis, I am thinking of the pioneering work of Dana Diminesco at Paris Tech, which shows that many are informed about the state of mind of the host countries. Is it any wonder that an exile prefers the country that shows its willingness to welcome him or her? Abdelmalek Sayad yesterday, Stéphane Beaud today, and many other researchers have shown it: immigrants and their descendants are not only capable of reconstructing their experience, they often offer lucid and penetrating analyses of it, particularly when the researcher leads them to cross points of view between generations, between genders, between communities. One of the tasks of the Migration Institute associated with my chair will be to trace the experience of immigrants and their descendants, with its share of upheavals and emancipation, trials and successes, frustrations and revenge, ruptures and solidarity. Rather than opposing statistical objectification to the testimonies of the actors, it provides a knowledge base or backdrop that gives them more meaning. We are therefore armed to comment on current events with full knowledge of the facts. Every two years on average since 1993, France has passed an immigration law. Two days ago, the Minister of the Interior defended his project before the committee of the National Assembly. Handling absolute figures, never proportions, he was alarmed at the fate of certain regions "in the process of deconstructing themselves because they are overwhelmed by flows of asylum seekers". Given the European context illustrated by the graph shown, this sounds strange. What is the problem, really? It is that of "spatial justice" in the face of asylum applications. How did the Germans manage to register five times as many applicants as we do and accept ten times as many? They applied the key for the distribution of federal state subsidies to the territories, which takes into account population and wealth, so let us try to hold a discourse of reason rather than a discourse of fear to our fellow citizens. Only a hasty reading of Michel Foucault could lead us to believe that statistics would only be an instrument of state domination or a benchmarking tool at the service of globalisation. The danger is not governance by numbers, but diversion by numbers. Let us use the science of numbers to establish the facts, trace causalities and measure the gap between reality and the ideal. Ideal of equality, social cohesion, non-discrimination. Republican ideal. Counting is no longer a state secret, still less a divine monopoly. As in the story of David, punished by Yahveh for having dared to count his people, we have the right to leave the alleys of our neighbourhood and go up to the belfry and take an overview of the city, map the world and locate ourselves, even if it means replacing the outdated image of the belfry with that of the GPS. In good demography, and in good democracy, it is not to dominate that the State must count, it is to be accountable. It must be accountable in the double sense of the word: accountable for its actions under the eyes of the citizens and capable of counting according to the rules of the art, which is what the scientist is concerned with, hence the importance, for example, of knowing how to reason with an equal population and not just in raw figures. This applies to all institutions. When the Missing Migrants programme counts the thousands of deaths on the roads to exile, it confronts the European Union with its responsibilities. It confronts us all with our responsibilities. Immigration is the work of migrants or exiles. But it is also ours. One day, Maurice Ravel was taken to a concert, when he was very ill. "Is this music beautiful?" he exclaimed. "Whose is it?" We had to answer him: "You composed it." It's a heart-wrenching story. May the genius be diminished to the point of no longer recognising his works! It seems that we suffer from the same illness with regard to immigration. We are the ones who composed it, and we have forgotten it. It is largely a by-product of the incursions of European nations into the countries of the South, the Levant and the East. It is also a way for men and women who migrate to react or respond to the global system of inequalities from which we cannot escape. Finally, it is the repercussion, finally, of the demands of our contribution to the formation of universal rights. For we have come to understand that a family life nourished by work is better than a life of toil sacrificing family life, and that this also applies to immigrants. We should recognise this as our work, instead of seeing it as an external constraint. How can we imagine that universal principles proclaimed in the face of the world can turn to our sole advantage? What would be the point of advocating a closed universality? France cannot propagate its vision of the universal without experiencing in return a significant diversification of its social landscape. Will it be able to integrate into its "national narrative" the multiple interactions that, in France as elsewhere, put migration at the heart of societies and will do so ever more? Thank you for your attention. Subtitles: Authôt