What is the socio-political meaning of the category of “immigrant” that the French integration policy officialised in 1990? The thesis uses a foucaldian sociology of quantification of immigration as a population to answer this question. The mobilization of a demographic knowledge, in the context of the reform of immigration statistics by the “Statistic” Group of the HIC between 1990 and 1997, leads to the formalization of a cognitive representation of immigration, as series of totalized and temporalized aggregates of individuals, from and in their juridical and legal mobility. In particular, we compare the process of categorization of the “immigrant” to a calculative method measurement of annuals flows of immigrations, as well as to the attempts to format the processing of AGDREF. This allows to switch from the analysis of socio-historical processes that objectivates the “origin” criteria, to an analysis in terms of (statistical) securitization of flows.
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