Challenging the paradigms

Nancy L. Green (b. 1951) is a leading scholar in the fields of nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration history, comparative history and social history, with a particular focus on France and the United States. Early on, she took gender history issues into account. After earning a PhD at the University of Chicago, and a doctorat d’État at the University of Paris 7, she taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1985 until her retirement in 2020. Her extensive research explores European and transatlantic labour migration. She has considered different groups of immigrants, such as male and female workers in the garment industry, as well as aspects of elite migration. Her influential studies have deepened our understanding of the interaction between migration and citizenship. She opened a debate about the notion of “transnationalism” in migration studies, emphasising on the one hand the contribution of immigrants in the building of cross-country ties, and, on the other hand, pointing out the limits of the transnationalism paradigm. She also served on the expert committee (Mission de préfiguration, later the History Commission) for the Cité (now Musée) nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (Paris). In 2007, the committee resigned, severely criticising the government of President Sarkozy for creating a contentious Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Solidarity Development.1Bridging the Anglo-American and Francophone academic worlds, Nancy L. Green has often acted as a mediator and translator between two scientific cultures that do not always recognise each other, or only do so with a certain delay. (L’Homme)

Kristina Schulz: In your article Four Ages of Migration Studies: Men, Women, Gender and Sexuality2, you retrace the stages through which women and gender appeared in migration studies. The first stage was characterised by historians moving away from the idea of a homogeneous working class and recognising the importance of migration and migrants. The second stage saw a shift in focus to immigrant women and their agency. Historians moved, thirdly, from studying working women to studying the social construction of gender and gender roles. The fourth stage has turned to examining different sexualities and intersectionality. Do you think these stages are specific to migration and the historisation of women and gender, or is this a general pattern of knowledge building? Would we, for instance, go through the same stages if we were to study children in migration?

Nancy L. Green: We can sketch out a first stage when, in the early 1970s and 1980s, migration history challenged the paradigm of social history by looking at diversity within the working class and recognising the presence of immigrants. However, initially this did not mean thinking of gender, a theme that was not yet on the historiographic agenda. But rather quickly, historians of migration began ‘finding’ women. Indeed, differentiation and diversity are driving forces of historiographic development. The first notion of diversity within the working class applied to immigrants as distinct from native workers. Then, the immigrant category itself became more complex by integrating women and then gender and theories about what gender means. This was not just about men and women but about differentiated categories and how they are constructed. I think that we now do need to do a lot more on how migration affects children and how the age at which they arrive plays a role. Age differentiation within migration studies is very important, but it has been little studied up to now. How do you define children? How does the social construction of childhood work, including from a legal point of view?

To that extent, I think you are quite right in pointing to how shifts in the social history of migration have been a part of knowledge building in general. At the beginning, historians who wanted to distinguish themselves from traditional political history examined the working class by studying the congresses of the socialist parties. This was a top-down organisational view of the working class. The ‘new’ social historians then started to look at the workers themselves. Historiographically speaking, when my generation started developing a new social history of immigration, this was part of the more general evolution of social history, moving to a differentiated and critical view on social groups and classes, and wanting to understand these notions in their social constructedness. This was taking place within a larger context of a historiographic transition, moving from structuralism to post-structuralism. Scholars come up with new ideas that bring about new questions, which is always useful!

Source: New York, 1957. Source: Wikimedia Commons

However, one aspect of historiographic ‘turns’ that is in my mind problematic is that older knowledge can be completely swept aside and considered to be too passé to be of any more use. This happened when the history of women moved on to that of gender. I like your term “knowledge building” because we do build on what came before. Some scholars want to just throw away all that came before, as opposed to considering that they are in fact building upon it, and can therefore keep elements of it. In my work on gender and migration, I try to do this, because I think that, to give an example, even the statistics on the number of men and women in the censuses tell us about the social construction of the categories at the time while also giving us data about who was arriving and when. Such information is still important.

Xenia von Tippelskirch: Don’t you think that there is a return of the social in the air?

Nancy L. Green: Yes. I guess I’ve been doing this long enough to have déjà vu. Even in terms of intersectionality, I would say that when we started to work on immigration, particularly on immigrant women, most of us already understood that they were at the same time women, immigrants and working class. These elements were all part of the definition. But since migration studies emerged from working-class history, we didn’t really even problematise class, we just started working on immigrants as workers. And when the focus turned to women, it was similar. We focused on their identity as women, while their ethnic origins and working-class status were just being assumed.

Again, I am always a little sceptical about ‘turns’. Sometimes, they become brutal in the sense that they want to dismiss everything that preceded them. But on the other hand, they do raise new questions. This is certainly what gender has done for women’s studies, just as the latter had done for migration studies in general. Such shifts in conceptualisation do push us to think about new things that can then be integrated into our analyses.

Ulrike Krampl: Your early books first focused on Jewish workers and then on garment workers more generally, while your more recent work, including an edited volume in 2022, looks at the international mobility of elites.3 Can you explain this shift from workers to elites? Was this an intentional decision? Are the questions the same, or does the social composition of the group you study change the analytical framework itself?

Nancy L. Green: Good question. My first books had been written in the context of the new social history of migration and working-class history. My work on the migration of elites, however, came from a very different starting point. I worked part time as a secretary in an international Paris law firm in order to support myself while I was working on my doctorate. The lawyers knew I was a historian, and, when the firm was celebrating its 75^th anniversary, they asked me to write its history. I soon realised how rich their archives were in terms of a history of business and capitalism. The history of the firm went back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The early lawyers principally dealt with American and Canadian clients who came to them for business matters, but sometimes also for family matters, be they divorces, inheritance issues or problems related to getting settled in France. When I started doing the history of the firm, I realised that it was also a history of Americans in France, an immigration story, albeit not the usual one of working-class immigrants. I felt a little guilty about no longer doing working-class history and instead investigating these rich businessmen. But I did it, and it was great fun. I thought it would be a quick project, but it took me ten years to complete! It became my book on The Other Americans in Paris4, and it led me to think about elite migration, different forms of labour (businessmen work too) and ultimately transnationalism.

That was when I started thinking about elites per se and what class means for mobility. What is the difference between being a rich or poor immigrant – in terms of settlement, assimilation, xenophobia? Together with Marianne Amar, research director at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, I organised a conference and then edited a collective book on this question.5 I had the feeling that I needed to explain to myself how I had moved from working-class history to a history of elites. While doing immigration history, I went from class and ethnicity to women to gender to reinjecting class – which is also what intersectionality is all about. It is important to ask: who are we talking about at different times in terms of class? If we are talking about women, what difference does it make whether they are modest women working on sewing machines or elite women hanging out in fancy hotels or setting up literary salons in Paris?

To me, it is also a story about how even elite groups, like other immigrants, become a community – by creating institutions, newspapers, religious groups, cultural activities, etc. Americans in Paris did all of these things, in the same way as all the other communities that I and my cohort of migration scholars have studied. Against the backdrop that the US is usually seen as a country of immigrants, it is interesting to show that Americans, too, act like other immigrants after moving abroad, to the extent that they start community activities of all sorts. As such, my book shows that Americans can be ‘immigrants’ too, even if they rarely use the term because of its (lower-)class connotation.

Ulrike Krampl: You did find some similarities between the two different classes by looking at them both through the lens of migration.

Nancy L. Green: Exactly. This is also a way of thinking about mobility, about the similarities of mobility, but also about the problems that mobility creates in terms of language, in terms of settling into a place where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you. It questions the importance of foreignness itself, how it is generally defined and how a certain class status may help mitigate rejection, although class is not a fool proof rampart against xenophobia. In terms of larger questions about assimilation or integration, class can matter a lot, but it also has its limits in terms of how much it can shield from forms of rejection. In a way, doing this history of Americans in Paris and demonstrating that this group can also be considered an immigrant group, led me to new questions about how class has an impact on migration and migrants. There is a class component at every stage, just as gender and age are also necessary for understanding transnationalism.

Ulrike Krampl: In your book Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work6, you very carefully develop questions relating to the methodological framework. You state that because of the very differences between the geographical areas under study, the comparative method brings us to question the categories of analysis. Has this led you to view the gender of migration differently? Having been criticised and, to some extent, superseded by relational approaches (‘transnational’, ‘cultural transfer’, ‘connected’, etc.), the comparative method is now enjoying renewed interest.7 Do you think it could be used again to understand the gendered dimension of migration?

Nancy L. Green: When I wrote my first book on Jewish workers in Paris, it was on one group in one place. But as the epilogue shows, I already felt that Jewish immigrants were only part of a larger story of immigrants in the garment industry. Certainly, a lot of the workers in the Paris garment industry were Jewish immigrants, and it was well known that a lot of Jewish immigrants in the United States also worked in this industry. But there were also other immigrants doing needlework. Although you could draw certain conclusions from doing a single case study, to me it was necessary to do comparative history in order to better understand the similarities and differences of each situation. Intellectually and epistemologically speaking, it seemed to me that to compare with other times or places would better explain whether this was specific to Jews at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, or if it was specific to this industry and the ways in which it was developing. Analysing a long period of time – a century – you could see different waves of people coming in and out of this industry. The question was thus how and why this industry developed, and why it still largely depends on immigrant workers in France and the United States today. It has to do with the way in which the cycle of fashion creates the constant need to quickly resupply shops.

To me, it was thus important to do a comparative study over both space and time. It seemed to me that the industry itself was creating a need for immigrant labour. There was also an attraction towards the city and towards a type of work which immigrants could easily access. As for the skills needed, the basic tasks required are relatively easy to learn just by doing them. Good technique comes with repetition. As in every industry, the aim of the industry has been to automate as much as possible to eliminate workers. Yet even now, while using computers for certain tasks, the garment industry still needs small workshops in the vicinity of the points of sale to supply them on short demand. The fast fashion world has been stubbornly dependent on two hands running a sewing machine. Products can be sourced quickly from China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania or Mexico, but they still require manual work. The comparison I undertook showed both the similarities and differences in the work process and the labour force over time, in terms of the immigrants who came to work in the industry. This was the only way to understand what had been ‘Jewish’ about the industry and what was more generally due to the industry’s structure itself.

One criticism of comparative history has been that it is too static and reifies the terms of comparison. Yet heuristically speaking, comparing using the categories available remains intellectually valuable in my opinion. For over ten years, I taught a collective seminar with Michael Werner, Kapil Raj, Yves Cohen and Cecilia d’Ercole, in which we repeatedly debated the relative merits of comparative, connected or ‘circulatory’ history, engaging each other and undoubtedly amusing the students, who heard us debate our different approaches.8 It was a stimulating seminar that remained friendly, even when we didn’t agree.

Although some comparative history can be limiting with its fixed categories and statistical charts, to me, ‘comparative history’ includes a lot of things, including crossed and connected histories! For example, by comparing two garment industries – which I easily recognise as being a researcher’s question, I also found how the French and Americans were interacting, comparing themselves to each other: the French were trying to understand how the Americans had standardised earlier, while the Americans were frustrated that the French seemed to have kept a better sense of style.9 There are moments when you see the actors themselves making connections or comparisons, and at other times it is the researcher who is asking the comparative questions.

I have always thought that both approaches (comparative/connected, etic/emic) are legitimate. They just ask different questions. I find it interesting that comparative history per se seems to be coming back, but to me, its purpose has always been to question single case studies and seek out similarity and specificity. It must be acknowledged that a researcher’s question may or may not necessarily be what the actors themselves are asking. This in itself is a perfectly legitimate and interesting epistemological issue.

Kristina Schulz: In some of your work you put emphasis on the distinction between “emigration” and “immigration”, rather than simply using “migration”, as is more common today. Why is that? Is this linked to the early and strong emergence of migration studies as immigration studies in the American context?

Nancy L. Green: Good point. I used “immigration” initially like everybody in my generation. We were writing from the perspective of the United States, a country that was mostly one of immigration. Our German, Polish and Hungarian colleagues were talking about emigration. It is a directional perspective; the new field of research first developed in the countries where the historic mass transatlantic immigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had arrived. In a book I edited with François Weil,10 we also wanted to change that perspective and bring the countries of origin into the story to see how the sending states saw what was going on, what the countries of emigration were worried about. But much of the scholarship that we still referred to was being done in the countries of immigration.

Obviously, we can study many other places in the world from different directional perspectives. To me this was clear. What was unstated was how and why immigration became the general term in migration history. There was the early assimilation paradigm (from the perspective of the countries of immigration), with the image that people started in one place, moved to another and settled there, and that was immigration. But “immigration” and “immigrants” could also be a troubling term.

When I did a short illustrated book in the Gallimard series Découvertes about immigration to the United States, the publisher chose the term “L’Odyssée des émigrants” for the subtitle, even though I preferred “immigrants” or “immigrés”.11The fact is that in France the terms “immigration” and “travailleur immigré” have a negative connotation. But the book is really about people arriving in the United States, not about their leaving home. It was mostly about nineteenth-twentieth century European immigration, along with subsequent Puerto Rican and other twentieth-century arrivals to the continent. Even the term “émigré” is not available in French because the word has a specific historical connotation, referring to the (noble) “émigrés” who fled during the French Revolution. I would have preferred “L’Odyssée des immigrés”, but I lost.

In my opinion, the reason that the prefixes for immigration and emigration have been dropped is linked to the new emphasis on transnationalism and mobility per se. This stems from an economic perspective on globalisation that began in the 1980s and 1990s. From this point of view, borders do not matter, and everybody and everything can circulate – money, capital, goods and people – although people were never able to circulate completely freely at any point in time. When you believe in the constant flow of people and goods, the “e-” (as in emigration) and the “im-” (as in immigration) seem superfluous. However, dropping the prefix also means getting rid of the analytical tools that allow us to analyse how transnationalism, agency and circulation relate to a neoliberal agenda. It is true that our image of a linear movement from A to B was incomplete. Many people never travelled in just one. There were zigzags along the path, and people could move around, sometimes returning to their place of origin. This was already true of the movement between Europe and the United States, but it has also been the case between Mexico or South America and the United States and now China.12

It is interesting to observe how language has changed as a result of perceived greater mobility. As a result, dropping the prefixes was an intellectual choice, made in order to emphasise mobility per se. However, I personally still use the prefixes when pertinent to point out directionality. The new emphasis on mobility and circulation has made us think about how we had focused, even in our choice of language and sources, on people arriving, settling in with their families. “Mobility” and “migration” without the prefixes put the focus on the ways many people go back and forth a lot and keep in touch with their home countries. Yet Roger Waldinger, for example, has shown that transnational circulatory mobility declines over time for the US case. As the years go on, people no longer go back and forth as much, and they do not send money home as often.13 Over generations, transnational mobility declines. So perhaps the prefixes (like comparative history) may have a comeback.

Kristina Schulz: So does the concept of transnationalism itself have its limits?

Nancy L. Green: This is what I have argued in The Limits of Transnationalism.14 There has been a lot of debate about transnationalism, but I think we are in a period of retraction, with walls being built everywhere. Working on transnationalism seemed obvious in the 1990s, but it turns out that this may have been a particularly circumscribed period. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union to 11 September 2001, there was this moment when many historians were saying, what’s the point of doing national history? It was as though the nation state would disappear. But historically, nations did exist, they still merit historical study, and, in the meantime, they have not disappeared. And nationalism seems to be getting worse and worse.

From 1989 to 2001, however, many people had the impression that one could circulate freely, with little constraint. As one colleague laughed, this was partly because academics now had frequent flyer cards, and they were travelling everywhere for research and conferences. Mobility became a defining term of our times. And yet one of the lessons from the book with François Weil was that not only should we pay more attention to the countries of origin, but that they themselves have also always placed limitations on what people could do. It is not just that countries like the Soviet Union or China had prohibited people from leaving; even in the nineteenth century, in Europe, as masses of people were heading overseas, countries worried about population loss and set parameters (military service, inheritance laws) to the possibility of leaving. In another collected volume I edited with Roger Waldinger, we examined how “transnationalism” had both a long history (at least a century before the 1980s) and was nonetheless always impacted by states’ concerns and policies.15

Epistemologically speaking, we had moved from an understanding of the world as being structured in certain ways, with various limitations, to a period when everyone was talking in much more post-structural terms, assuming there were fewer restraints and greater agency. I had already argued for the necessity of a “post-structural structuralism” (in Ready-to-Wear) as a way of combining agency and structure, looking at how individuals and groups chose to migrate and gravitate towards the garment industry, but within the realm of structural possibilities that these activities offered. Then, in The Limits of Transnationalism, I looked at how, even in periods that have been defined as quite mobile, there have always been certain constraints on that mobility. In that book, the focus is on the problems people had once they crossed borders.

The first chapter of the book introduces a Franco-American who ends up settled in the south of France, but is threatened with arrest for having sold fake wine. I found his fascinating story in the national archives in the US. He was a perfect ‘transnational’ in the sense that although he was born in the US, he had a French father, grew up in the US, and then went to France as a young man, married a French woman in the south of France and took over his father-in-law’s vineyard. He wrote, pleadingly and in exasperation, to all of his numerous connections in both the US and France, to senators and other politicians whom he hoped would defend him. Which, as it turned out, they wouldn’t, for various reasons. It is a case of someone who is very transnational, but who still comes up against a lot of barriers. I felt (the book came out in 2019 and earlier articles along these lines had appeared in 2011 and 2017)16 that it was important to think of and warn about the limits of transnationalism, particularly in a contemporary period when it had seemingly become a seamless way of understanding the world. I felt the need to push back against that.

Currently the discussion about transnationalism seems to have played itself out, and will undoubtedly dissipate as the actual constraints today are becoming clearer and clearer (with climate concerns also limiting long-distance travel), and things are not going to get any better. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of us thought that there would be no more walls, but they keep building them everywhere! – sorry, I get emotional – from the United States to Israel, and the borders against immigration to Europe are just getting worse and worse. Clearly, transnationalism has had its day.

Xenia von Tippelskirch: Women, or gender, are rather invisible in the book Citizens and Those who Leave (2007)17, which you edited with François Weil. Is this because women emigrated less? Or is it because the sources do not allow us to say much about women? Perhaps they are less visible as emigrants, moving back and forth? Is it because of the focus on politics? Or is it simply the effect of the research network on emigration and its special interests and composition?

Nancy L. Green: [Sigh] Yes. I think we were ‘gender blind’ when we did this project, as we were in the book I edited with Roger Waldinger on transnationalism (2016).18 Both books had different historiographical points, on the one hand more about the state and reinjecting the perspective of emigration into our understanding of migration, and on the other about the importance of understanding a long history of transnationalism that includes not just individual agency but also politics and the state. Yet, I might add that, after having published my first book on Jewish immigrants, to my astonishment someone complimented me for talking about women, which I had not explicitly set out to do; I think you find what you look for. I do not consider myself to be one of the first researchers to have worked on women, gender and immigration. I really think of people like Donna Gabaccia (1989) in the US or Mirjana Morokvasic in France (1984).19 When I published my chapter on the subject in Repenser les migrations.“De l’immigré à l’immigrée” (2002)20, it had evolved from a paper I had written for a conference in Rouen in 1997 entitled Is History Possible without Women?21 This perspective was new in France, but less so in the US at the time. It seemed obvious to me that we had to talk about it.

There are different moments when you emphasise different things. Class had been a main category; later there was a resurgence of interest in the state. Citizenship and Those who Leave was part of that. Of course, as other scholars have since well pointed out, the state is not gender-blind; it often allows people to enter or leave in gendered ways. There has been a lot of really good work now on the state, in terms of immigration (more so than on emigration) and the gendering of state policies, for example by Linda Guerry.22 How does the state perceive men and women in terms of who is coming in, whom it wants and when, and whom it doesn’t want? State policies are also related to political economy. When you want factory workers, you mostly want men, except in the textile factories. When you need care workers, you mostly favour women. The periods of industrialisation and post-industrialisation have thus been very much gendered in terms of labour force needs, and this has had an impact on state immigration policies.

Kristina Schulz: Does gender play a role in the politics of limiting transnationalism, of limiting the crossing of borders?

Nancy L. Green: Yes, you are right. However, the gender component of transnationalism has been under-theorised. Just as the term “immigration” has long been imagined to refer to poor, young, working men, the term “transnationalism” has initially been used largely to analyse wealthy businessmen, travelling with multiple passports. Neither the mafia, sweatshop workers nor academics initially fit the image. Gender also plays a role in who has been perceived as transnational. Women were not at first thought of as part of this elite class, although they are increasingly so. One could almost say that the discussion about transnationalism has been even more male-oriented than other histories of migration. But what about care workers? They are perfectly transnational in that they go back and forth, have elaborate rotation systems of replacing one another in the labour market, but until recently the term transnational was not used to describe them. This is a problem of terminology and conceptualisation, and of better integrating different classes and gender into the study of transnationalism. There is definitely work to be done.

Xenia von Tippelskirch: You could be called an ‘expat’ or an ‘American historian working in France’. I remember that when I first met you, I had the strong feeling that you were acting as a mediator between different scientific cultures. Is that how you see it? You mentioned people from sociology and anthropology with whom you have worked. Do you see yourself as a mediator between different disciplines, or between different national historiographical frameworks?

Nancy L. Green: I did my PhD in history at the University of Chicago and came to France to do my research, and I ended up staying, but I have always maintained my intellectual ties to the US. The core of the people that I first talked to were American scholars of the new social history of immigration, who were also interested in women and gender. Among them, Donna Gabaccia, Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch have remained a group of friends beyond the Academy.23 Then I was in France when debates about women’s and gender history started. As you know, there have been long discussions and reflections on the differences between the feminist movements in France and the United States – differences in timing, terminology and emphasis. I was here in Paris when these academic debates began, and I was invited to participate in a seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales with, among others, Michelle Perrot, Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch. There may be a bit of a time lag between the two countries, but in the long run I feel the differences were not so great. In fact, many of the same issues were being debated in both places at roughly similar points in time.

For me it was very stimulating. In some cases, people saw me as bringing this into immigration history. Whereas for me, I was translating or bringing up discussions that I was having with my American colleagues. It was intellectually a very interesting time to debate and discuss the issues of the shift from women’s history to gender history, and to see it being played out in different languages. I think my timing was good. I was happy to be privy to these debates in France. But I also recognise that, simply due to timing, I was more involved in those discussions then than in the more recent ones about intersectionality, which I feel has always been part of our considerations, even avant la lettre. I remember, in the late 1960s in Madison24 there were women’s groups getting together to discuss the Vietnam War, women’s rights, etc., and there were women of colour who were already saying, well, what about us and the difference that race makes?

I think these questions have always been there, but it is very important that they have come to the fore again. A major topic now in migration studies, but also in women’s and gender history, is sexuality: different forms of sexuality and how people move because of that too. This has led to many new questions that had previously been neglected. New questions are not necessarily the only questions to ask, but they are always thought-provoking. And I think that this is an important part of historiography: its continually changing nature. I don’t know if artificial intelligence will come up with something like intersectionality all by itself. I think you need people who are involved.

The discussions I have been able to have with colleagues, both in Paris and in the US, have always been very thought-provoking for me – including your own questions to me, which have highlighted aspects of my work that I might not have considered. I was tremendously lucky to end up at the École des Hautes Études because it has been an inspiring intellectual environment. As much as I could perhaps sometimes bring another perspective to my colleagues here, I feel that I have learned as much from them as I may perhaps have imparted. In my case, I’m lucky: immigration has been good for me!

The interview took place at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris on 2 December 2024.