Abstract
While family reunification has become a major concern in Europe, with the view that migrants overuse their right to reunite, this chapter shows that Senegalese migrants are largely oriented towards their origin country. Migrants in Europe are predominantly engaged in transnational families, their spouse(s) and/or child(ren) being left behind in Senegal. They thus live transnational lives, involving comings and goings and various sorts of transfers and contacts. This pattern echoes the multi-residential family systems observed that have long been observed within Senegal. Benefiting from the transnational and longitudinal nature of the MAFE data, this chapter challenges the widely shared assumption that family reunification in Europe is the normal path followed by most migrants. The statistical results show that “living apart together” across borders is a long-lasting arrangement for many Senegalese migrants: 10 years after migration, 82% of the married migrants who left their spouses behind are still separated from them; and 88% of those who left a child behind in Senegal are still separated from it. It is quite common for such periods of separation to be ended by reunification at origin (i.e. in Senegal), when the migrant returns. As regards reunification with left-behind children, this is more common than reunification in Europe. On average, migrants who maintain a transnational family life are more vulnerable than other migrants: they are more frequently undocumented, less educated and of lower socio-economic status. In the end, the high prevalence of transnational families appears to be a mixed product of personal (individual or family) choices and policy constraints.
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Notes
- 1.
After Senegal, the highest proportion of extended households in the region is 24%, in Guinea. This wide gap between the two countries with the highest proportions clearly illustrates the prevalence of large extended families among Senegalese family structures.
- 2.
Family reunification is governed by a law passed in 1998 in Italy and a royal decree of 1996 in Spain. Even though reunification rules were defined later in these two new countries of immigration than in France, the criteria used to grant the right of reunification are very similar in France, Italy and Spain, the three European countries in our study.
- 3.
Social remittances are the non-material contacts through which migrants and their households at origin can influence each other, for instance in terms of ideas, norms and ways of doing things.
- 4.
In fact this idealized view of the Western family is also increasingly contradicted by the growing complexity of family arrangements in European populations.
- 5.
This term was proposed by Riccio (2001) to refer to migrants engaged in a transnational life. Here, we use it to refer to migrants who are part of a transnational nuclear family.
- 6.
At least two things can explain the high proportion of bachelors among Senegalese men arriving in France. The first is related to the organization of migration among the first wave of migrants: origin communities deliberately organized the departure of young male migrants (see above the literature review). The second concerns the more recent waves of migrants, among whom students are increasingly numerous (see also Chap. 13).
- 7.
Interestingly, the proportion of divorced women is much higher than the proportion of divorced men at the time of migration (11% against 2%) and also increases after migration. This suggests that there is a significant relationship between the experience of international migration and the social status of women in Senegalese society.
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Beauchemin, C., Caarls, K., Mazzucato, V. (2018). Senegalese Families Between Here and There. In: Beauchemin, C. (eds) Migration between Africa and Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69569-3_15
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