揭开“熔炉”——移民史的视野与路径

In this interview, Philippe Rygiel reflects on the foundations, developments, and contemporary challenges of migration history. He emphasizes the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the field, which emerged from social history but has been shaped by law, demography, political science, and, more recently, digital humanities. Migration history has traditionally focused on transnational movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet its boundaries remain flexible, encompassing international migration, internal mobility, refugee history, and diaspora studies.The interview highlights the central role of the state and legal frameworks in defining migrants’ statuses, rights, and life trajectories. Legal categories profoundly shape individual experiences, influence family strategies, and often generate unintended consequences, such as the long-term settlement of populations initially regarded as temporary. Rygiel also stresses the importance of combining different scales of analysis, from individual life stories to global dynamics, and underlines the growing significance of quantitative methods and large-scale databases made possible by recent advances in computing and artificial intelligence.Finally, the discussion addresses the connections between migration history, gender studies, microhistory, and global history, as well as the political stakes raised by the tightening of migration policies in contemporary Europe. Migration history thus emerges as a key field for understanding social change, power relations, and current debates on otherness, citizenship, and mobility.