Introduction

The study of migration is undergoing a metamorphosis. This is motivated by an increasing awareness among scholars and practitioners that the old categories adopted do not match the fi eld any more. Traditionally, the question of migration has been compartmentalised on the basis of discipline and stages or characteristics of the migration phenomenon. For instance, geographers and demographers have concentrated on migration patterns and fl ows while sociologists generally looked at processes of settlement and integration in receiving countries; asylum and refugees remained for a long time the preserve of lawyers. Migrants on arrival were considered a tabula rasa so that the causes of migration and their consequences were rarely linked despite the fact that the subjects involved were the same but at different poles of the trajectory. What is clearer today is that the interconnections weaving the fabric of international migration require a holistic and interdisciplinary approach (Joly, 2000; Brettell and Hollifi eld, 2000; Arango, chapter 1 in this book; Phizacklea, chapter 6 in this book;). This is strengthened by the diversifi ed nature of migration at the end of the twentieth century which makes it more diffi cult to separate out international migration considered on the one hand as movement and, on the other hand, as the settlement of migrants and their interaction with majority society (often formulated as ethnic relations in much of the Anglo-Saxon literature). It has been argued that while migration was characterised historically by structured patterns of movement to traditional destinations, contemporary migration associated with globalisation, in contrast, is turbulent and fl uid with multidirectional and reversible trajectory (Papastergiadis, 2000).