A Call to De-economicize the Sociology of Migration

The contemporary tendency of states to admit or reject migrants based on their economic utility has been documented by many sociologists and other social science researchers. However, few sociologists have critically analyzed the theoretical underpinnings with which they themselves tend to approach migratory phenomena. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the economistic bias at the heart of the sociology of migration, and to present its downsides. Starting with a case study —the sociology of migration in Quebec, Canada —the article shows how this bias tends to structure the framing of the social phenomenon of migration. The article then presents the main pitfalls of such an economistic bias for sociological thought: the neglect of emigration contexts; the dispossession of agentivity in migrant people; and the renewal of an ethnocentric and neocolonialist analysis of migration. The article concludes with two suggestions for de-economicizing the sociology of migration.