The Mediterranean is a representative space of migrations in the world. This subject, publicized and politicized, is the subject of simplification and commonplaces at the very moment when, for about thirty years, it becomes more complex and diversified.
He is at the heart of this dialogue between Bernard Mossé, scientific director of NEEDE Mediterranean, and Andrea Calabretta, a sociologist specializing in migrations worldwide, particularly in the Mediterranean and in Italy. This helps to better understand this specific issue.
To be continued over five weeks.
#3 - The Mediterranean is characteristic of the politicization of the migration theme
Bernard Mossé: You have outlined an overview of migrations around the world and the sociology of migrations over the past decades. Can you refocus on the migratory phenomenon in the Mediterranean?
Andrea Calabretta: Yes, of course. The risk with the Mediterranean is to think of it as the center of the world. But I truly believe that the Mediterranean is one of the paradigmatic spaces of migration. It is a space that allows us to understand new dynamics, reshaping the dynamics of the past. And in relation to this, I think we can now discern four aspects, four dimensions.
The first one, I have already addressed, is the issue of politicization. It is truly at the heart of the migration challenge today, and we can see it very clearly in the Mediterranean.
Let's take the Italian case. Until the 1990s, one could arrive in Italy without a visa system. Truly, one could depart from anywhere in the world and, with a passport, arrive in Rome or Milan... It was truly free movement, and it's something so distant today that it takes an effort to imagine... it's incredible: we don't even have the tools to conceive it anymore, and it's in the span of 30 years that it has completely changed.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there have been 30,000 deaths while crossing the Mediterranean in the last 10 years, with 80% of them occurring in the Central Mediterranean, meaning to reach Italy. We are talking about thousands and thousands of people who have died trying to cross a border that did not exist until the 1990s.
In the Mediterranean, we can clearly see how the politicization of the issue, its criminalization, has tragic and multidimensional effects. It starts with the observation that there are populations on the move, lacking resources, easy to marginalize, foreigners beyond our group. And this vulnerability allows us to construct a social identity at little cost.
This is the first Mediterranean dimension, paradigmatic of what is happening in the world.
A second dimension, linked to this first one, is that of borders. The visibility given to migrations has accentuated the weight of the question of borders. Not only in the common sense, but also among researchers, with the development of Border Studies, which did not exist 30 or 40 years ago. The works of Sandro Mezzadra, for example, tell us that we can use the border as an epistemological tool to understand migration and society in general. This is the case with the Mexican border or elsewhere. But the Mediterranean is central in the construction of the border as a normative object, a political object, and also a scientific object.
We talk about the "European fortress". But the border should be seen less as a wall than as a filter that holds back some and lets others pass. And it remains on the backs of those who have crossed. Thus, we see the multiplication of internal borders in the European societies north of the Mediterranean. This creates a fragmented society with a "citizenship pyramid": we have citizens on paper, but who are not recognized as such; long-term residents, short-term residents, asylum seekers... These different statuses are functional for our economies. If we think about migrant workers from the 1990s, or even 1970s, they arrived with a very specific status, whereas today asylum seekers, for example, are pushed to work to prove they deserve asylum. As if there were a suspicion a priori on this matter... This is obviously a much more precarious situation than before...
Bernard: On this point, can we say that there is a porous social boundary between the Immigrant and the Refugee, even a politically maintained confusion between the Migrant and the Exiled?
Andrea: Let's say that it is not a "natural" confusion in the sense that it is based on the need for foreign labor: thus, a more precarious, more exploitable status is obtained, for example, for the agriculture in the south of Italy. This multiplication of external and internal borders in the Mediterranean makes people's lives more complex...
That was the second dimension. The third point brings us back to questions already addressed: the increasing complexity of the motivations of the actors who are moving.
We have moved from a very specific framework of international agreements in the 1950s for the sending of labor from the south bank to the north bank, between the countries of the Maghreb and France, between Italy and Belgium, between Turkey and Germany...
We also had another very specific category, that of family reunification.
But today, the motivations are multiple and intertwined, and the categories of the State are inadequate: the applicants are individuals who come to work, but also those who travel for health, family reasons...
One can also consider the question of the climate crisis as a motivation for migration. Is it a motivation among others or is it a priority, in the world and in the Mediterranean in particular?
There is a rather catastrophic discourse from international organizations on this. I believe, of course, that we are experiencing a very deep climate crisis, but the connection made by these organizations between the climate crisis and migration seems politicized and exaggerated to me.
I will pick up on the analysis of the Dutch sociologist, Hein de Haas. For example, IOM tells us that during the decade 2012-2022, more than 21 million people migrated due to natural disasters. And the same organization tells us that by 2050, there will be 1 billion people exposed to climate risk in coastal areas. This is a rather mechanistic view of migration. Migration is never monocausal. Migrants are not objects that move mechanically in the world. This does not take into account two well-known recurring phenomena:
- First, the phenomenon of resilience: populations tend overwhelmingly to stay where they grew up and adapt to changes in environmental conditions.
- On the other hand, it is not the most deprived who migrate. They are neither the poorest nor the richest, but rather individuals from the middle class seeking to improve their conditions.
If we use the numbers and proportions provided by international organizations for projections very far in the future, we do not anticipate an objective reality, but we pose a problem to manage. We always come across this question of politicization.
There will certainly be areas strongly affected by climate change that can generate migratory movements, combined with the search for a better economic life or the search for biographical experiences, but we cannot think of the climate crisis as a game of marbles pushing balls. It is a theme to be addressed, yes, but not as a fear.
Bernard: In the common sense, as you say, there is also the idea of invasion. Isn't it contradicted by the fact that South-South migrations are becoming the majority and by the importance of nearby migrations?
Andrea: Yes, many misconceptions need to be dispelled, including in sociological discourse. Regarding South-South migrations, I have identified very interesting data from IOM. It is always thought that poor countries are countries of emigration. However, among the countries with the highest emigration rates in the world, we find the United Kingdom and Germany in the 14th and 18th positions. On the contrary, China, considered a poor country, receives a large number of migrants. It is a much more complex world than discourses suggest. There are short movements, South-South movements, increasingly complex secondary movements. And the climate crisis further complicates the picture... It's our world... it is complex, but the alarmist rhetoric of invasion does not correspond to reality.
I would finish, if you agree, with the fourth dimension of Mediterranean migrations. It involves the increasing complexity not only of the categories of actors and motivations, but also of the contexts. One can think of the case of Italy, which, until the beginning of the 20th century, was a country of emigration and, from the 1970s onwards, while continuing to be a departure point for emigrations to France and Northern Europe, also becomes a destination for international migrations. In recent years, it has also experienced the reality of internal migrations, increasingly becoming a transit country. And this is the case throughout the Mediterranean, in Spain, Greece, or Portugal, as well as in Turkey or Tunisia.
This complexification is also linked, as we have seen, to an internal complexification of social hierarchies, with different legal and social statuses, but also because of a complexification on an international scale, as there is a need to negotiate with the countries on the southern shore that are interconnected by migratory movements.
Biographies
Andrea CALABRETTA is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua (Italy), where he teaches courses on qualitative research methods in sociology. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2023 with a thesis on transnational relations between the Tunisian community in Italy and the home country, based on the mobilization of Pierre Bourdieu's theories. In addition to relations with the home context, he has worked on the processes of social inclusion and exclusion affecting migrants and their descendants, their work paths in Italian society, and the processes of identity construction of migrants.
Bernard Mossé Historian, Research, Education, and Training Manager of the NEEDE Mediterranean association. Member of the Scientific Council of the Camp des Milles Foundation - Memory and Education, for which he was the scientific manager and coordinator of the UNESCO Chair "Education for Citizenship, Human Sciences, and Convergence of Memories" (Aix-Marseille University / Camp des Milles).
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From this conversation, the AI generated a flow of illustrations. Stefan Muntaner fed it with editorial data and guided the aesthetic dimension. Each illustration thus becomes a unique work of art through an NFT.