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Held in Nice on 6, 7 and 8 December 2007, this conference brought together over forty researchers from 14 different countries and 28 universities or research centres, chiefly of Europe. Above and beyond the participants, it attracted over fifty viewers, including social workers, students, journalists and teachers.

Theme:

Our initial observation maintained that in a changing socio-economic context, the employment of foreigners is taking on new forms. Today's global context is indeed increasingly faceted by international competition, due both to technological advances and market liberalisation. In Europe, geographical region of particular interest to the members of this conference, these changes are accompanied by an important political dimension: the construction and enlargement of the European Union.

Although the labour markets of EU countries remain only partially opened to the newer EU members, the changes have, for several years already, called into question the very nature of labour migrations. Today one speaks of temporary workers, assigned workers or else seasonal workers, whereas the term "migrant" seems to have disappeared or become the condemnable legacy of a time past. The provision of international services and the introduction of temporary workers are indeed increasingly promoted by European legislation; yet this is accompanied by political discourse which endorses the tightening of borders and frequently publicises the aspiration to limit further migrant settling. The French president recently demonstrated this tendency through a policy aimed to support "chosen migration" at the expense of settler migration, supposedly "endured".

Whether from countries new to the EU or from countries on its outskirts, migrants are facing a number of constraints that are new in several aspects. These aspects, whether legislative, social, economic or political, are what various communicants tried to render intelligible, through diverse case studies and according to various approaches and disciplines.

In parallel, this new context has made way for innovative practices on the part of the migrants who appear to have greater ease today in maintaining their mobility. Anchoring themselves in diverse socio-economic spaces, they take advantage of numerous, often precarious opportunities in increasingly vast territorial spaces, putting their places of origin into relation with those where they stop, often temporarily, to work.

One of the themes of the conference, by taking numerous case studies from across Europe, was also to take interest in the interrelations between constraints and opportunities which condition the very existence of these movements.

Throughout the conference, we chose to accentuate the most equivocal situations of migrant work, those which combine difficult work, relative opacity in terms of the law and great precariousness of employment (prostitution, agriculture, domestic work, construction…). This choice does not result from an inclination for the sordid, but from the presumption that it is within these fragile apertures, and due to their very fragility, that the most advanced forms of work deregulation are constructed and tested. The conference hence explored the associations between foreign/ national workers, as well as the ties between legal/ illegal, formal/ informal.