Trajectories migratoires et espaces de sociabilité: Stratégies de migrants de France à Montréal

Migratory trajectories in settlement contexts take many pathways. However, these pathways are often presented in a liner fashion with particular insistence, both in society in general and among scholars and decision makers, on the notion of “integration.” There is no one definition of this notion, even though much of the literature evokes a continuum going from leaving the place of origin at one end to “full integration” in the host setting at the other. This order of things is reminiscent of Robert Park's (1949) classic schema whereby the assimilation of the minority group by the majority is the ultimate phase of social relations in urban settings. This view continues to shape the public imagination, particularly among members of the settlement society's majority group.

Settlement during migration has economic, social and symbolic dimensions. Are these dimensions reflected in the trajectories of migrants from France, who display, according to Canadian immigrant selection criteria, optimal qualities (i.e., age, education, language skills, socio-economic status)? Do they become “fully integrated”? And does this integration involve the convergence of identity practices towards a dominant model?

The settlement trajectories and sociability profiles of migrants of French and Franco-Maghreb origin are identified with the help of an original field approach: the spaces of sociability. These spaces, made up of active and significant (for the migrant) links, make it possible to gain an overview of the social environments of migrants, in particular the home, the neighborhood, the work place, leisure activities and religious activities. Membership and identity strategies emerge from this corpus, in unexpected ways in the beginning. The relationship to language, the memory to be transmitted, relationships to the country of origin, to other places and to family members all become central research foci.

Migrants from France all participate formally in the economy, maintain sociability links and are at home in the majority group's institutions. They have differing identity strategies, at times inclusive, at times exclusive. The spaces of sociability are comprised of co-nationals, co-nationals, other migrants and non-migrants, or of exclusively non-migrants. These different modes of social grounding do not predict feeling of belonging to place of origin, place of residence, and for others, other places. However, they can be associated with behaviours that reveal various strategies, in particular retaining the accent of the place of origin or adopting a local or diffused accent, choice of schools for children, and more generally identity strategies with regard to children. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)