Nancy L. Green maps migration research’s changing compass

From tracing how women and gender entered migration history, to questioning the limits of “transnationalism,” Nancy L. Green has spent decades reshaping how scholars think about mobility, citizenship, and class—from Parisian garment workshops to the archives o

On 2 December 2024, inside the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, Nancy L. Green spoke with Kristina Schulz and Xenia von Tippelskirch and Ulrike Krampl about how migration studies keeps changing its own terms—sometimes to illuminate new realities. sometimes to sweep older knowledge aside.

Green. a leading scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration history. comparative history and social history. focuses particularly on France and the United States. Born in 1951, she took gender history issues into account early in her career. 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 research explores European and transatlantic labour migration. examining immigrant groups such as male and female workers in the garment industry. as well as aspects of elite migration.

The debate she built—through both her scholarship and her participation in institutional work—has been consistent: how migration scholarship defines categories. and what it risks losing when it declares a “turn.” She opened a debate about the notion of “transnationalism” in migration studies. arguing on the one hand for the contribution of immigrants in building cross-country ties. while on the other hand emphasising 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, that committee resigned, severely criticising the government of President Sarkozy for creating a contentious Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Solidarity Development.

Green’s influence also crosses borders inside academia. Bridging the Anglo-American and Francophone academic worlds, she 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)

Her interview returned again and again to one question: what happens to people—and to evidence—when scholarship chooses what to discard.

Schulz asked her to retrace the stages in which women and gender appeared in migration studies in the article Four Ages of Migration Studies: Men. Women. Gender and Sexuality. Green described a first stage in the early 1970s and 1980s when migration history challenged the paradigm of social history by looking at diversity within the working class and recognising immigrants’ presence. But she said gender was not on the historiographic agenda at first. “Historians began ‘finding’ women” only later, driven by differentiation and diversity as historiographic development. She argued that the immigrant category itself became more complex when women were integrated and then gender and theories about what gender means. The shift, she said, was not simply about “men and women” but about differentiated categories and how they are constructed.

When Schulz asked whether the stages were specific to migration or part of a broader pattern of knowledge-building—and whether the same stages would apply to children in migration—Green answered that the work still needs to do more. “Age differentiation within migration studies is very important. but it has been little studied up to now.” She pointed directly to a problem of definition: “How do you define children?. How does the social construction of childhood work, including from a legal point of view?”.

Her scepticism returned when she spoke about historiographic transitions. She said one aspect of “turns” she finds problematic is when older knowledge is “completely swept aside” as too passé to be useful. She gave the example of what happened when history of women moved on to gender. Green liked the term “knowledge building” because she believes scholars build on what came before. Some scholars. she said. want to throw away what came before; in her own work on gender and migration. she tries not to.

She offered an example grounded in method: even the statistics on the number of men and women in the censuses can show how social categories were socially constructed at the time, while also giving data about who was arriving and when. “Such information is still important,” she said.

The same friction between what changes and what should be retained showed up in her discussion of a “return of the social.” Asked by Tippelskirch whether there is such a return “in the air. ” Green said she had enough experience to feel déjà vu. She argued that intersectionality did not arrive from nowhere: when migration scholars began focusing on immigrant women. many already understood them as women. immigrants and working class at once—elements already part of the definition. But because migration studies emerged from working-class history. she said class was not properly problematised; immigrants were treated as workers. then shifted to women as women. while their ethnic origins and working-class status were just assumed.

For Green, the question is not whether new frameworks raise new questions—they do. Her worry is about how “turns” can become brutal when they dismiss what came before. New conceptualisations “push us to think about new things. ” she said. and in the same way that gender did for women’s studies. it had done for migration studies.

That tension—between discovery and dismissal—threads through her life’s scholarly arc. Earlier books first focused on Jewish workers and then on garment workers more generally. More recent work, including an edited volume in 2022, looks at the international mobility of elites. Krampl asked her to explain the shift from workers to elites. whether it was intentional. and if the questions were the same.

Green described how the project began while she worked part time as a secretary in an international Paris law firm in order to support herself while working on her doctorate. The lawyers asked her to write the firm’s history during the firm’s 75th anniversary. She realised their archives held a rich history of business and capitalism—stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century—centered on American and Canadian clients who sometimes sought help for family matters such as divorces. inheritance issues. or issues related to getting settled in France.

As she wrote. Green said she saw it as “also a history of Americans in France. ” an immigration story. though not the usual one of working-class immigrants. She admitted she felt guilty about leaving working-class history behind—then said it became “great fun.” She thought the project would be quick. but it took ten years. It became her book The Other Americans in Paris. pushing her to think about elite migration. different forms of labour. and ultimately transnationalism.

She linked elite migration to the question of class and mobility: what differs between being a rich or poor immigrant in terms of settlement. assimilation. xenophobia. Alongside Marianne Amar. research director at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration. she organised a conference and then edited a collective book on elite migration and class.

To Green, shifting from workers to elites wasn’t abandoning labour history—it was changing the lens. In her view. even elite groups. like other immigrants. become a community by creating institutions. newspapers. religious groups. cultural activities. and more. She described Americans in Paris as doing the same. She also argued that Americans can be “immigrants” even if they rarely use the term. because of its (lower-)class connotation.

Krampl had asked whether similarities exist between the two classes by looking at them through migration. Green answered yes. as a way of thinking about mobility and its problems: language. settling where nobody knows you. and the limits of class as protection. Class may mitigate rejection, she said, but it does not guarantee safety from xenophobia.

Even when she spoke about methodology—comparative history in Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work—Green kept returning to the need to keep categories under scrutiny rather than treat them as fixed. She explained that her comparative approach questioned categories of analysis because of “very differences between the geographical areas under study.” She said comparative history became necessary when she wrote her first book on Jewish workers in Paris: Jewish immigrants were part of a larger story of immigrants in the garment industry. and there were also other immigrants doing needlework.

She argued that comparing with other times or places helps clarify whether outcomes were specific to Jews at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. or to the industry and how it developed. Analyzing a long period—“a century”—allowed her to see different waves of people coming in and out of the industry and to understand why garment work still largely depends on immigrant labour in France and the United States today.

For Green, the garment industry itself helps explain the labour demand. Fast fashion creates a need to quickly resupply shops. The basic tasks require relatively easy skills learned by doing them; good technique comes with repetition. She said the garment industry aims to automate as much as possible to eliminate workers. yet even now—with computers for certain tasks—small workshops near points of sale remain necessary to supply on short demand. She said products can be sourced quickly from China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania or Mexico, but manual work is still required.

She also acknowledged a criticism of comparative history: that it can be too static and reify terms of comparison. Heuristically, she said, comparing using categories available remains valuable. Her own view of comparative history includes “crossed and connected histories.” In studying garment industries. she found the French and Americans interacting—French trying to understand how Americans had standardised earlier. and Americans frustrated that the French kept a better sense of style.

Green’s insistence on keeping older tools alive surfaced again in her discussion with Schulz about “emigration” and “immigration. ” rather than using “migration” as a blanket term. She said she used “immigration” early because the scholarship in her generation was written from the United States perspective. a country mostly one of immigration. But she noted that German, Polish and Hungarian colleagues were talking about emigration, which is directional.

She described how her edited book with François Weil aimed to change perspective by bringing countries of origin into the story—showing what sending states worried about and how they saw events. Yet much scholarship referenced still worked from countries of immigration.

Green said that language choices have consequences. In France, she said, “immigration” and “travailleur immigré” carry negative connotations. She described how. in a short illustrated book in the Gallimard series Découvertes about immigration to the United States. the publisher chose the subtitle “L’Odyssée des émigrants” even though she preferred “immigrants” or “immigrés.” She said she lost because “émigré” is not available in French in the way she wanted. because it carries a specific historical connotation—referring to the (noble) “émigrés” who fled during the French Revolution. She would have preferred “L’Odyssée des immigrés,” but she said she lost.

For her. dropping the prefixes is linked to the new emphasis on transnationalism and mobility per se. stemming from an economic perspective on globalisation that began in the 1980s and 1990s. In that worldview, borders do not matter and everything circulates: money, capital, goods and people. She said the “e-” and “im-” prefixes can look superfluous in that framing. But she argued that removing prefixes also removes analytical tools that help analyse how transnationalism. agency and circulation relate to a neoliberal agenda.

She added that mobility is never complete freedom at any point in time. People zigzag. Some return. That has been true between Europe and the United States and also between Mexico or South America and the United States and now China.

Green pointed to a measurable example tied to transnational mobility: Roger Waldinger has shown transnational circulatory mobility declines over time for the US case. As years go on, people go back and forth less and send money home less. Over generations, transnational mobility declines. “So perhaps the prefixes (like comparative history) may have a comeback,” she said.

When asked by Schulz if transnationalism has limits, Green did not soften the answer. She said this is what she argued in The Limits of Transnationalism. She said she sees a period of retraction, with walls being built everywhere. She recalled how. from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union to 11 September 2001. it felt like the nation state might disappear and the point of national history might vanish. For Green, that moment made “mobility” seem seamless; academics travelled on frequent flyer cards, and mobility became a defining term.

But she said the book with François Weil taught that countries of origin have always placed limitations. Even in the nineteenth century. as masses headed overseas. European countries worried about population loss and set parameters through military service and inheritance laws. In another collected volume edited with Roger Waldinger. she said they examined how “transnationalism” had a long history—at least a century before the 1980s—and was nonetheless always impacted by states’ concerns and policies.

She described the narrative arc of her own work too: in Ready-to-Wear. she argued for a “post-structural structuralism” to combine agency and structure—how individuals choose to migrate and gravitate towards the garment industry within structural possibilities. In The Limits of Transnationalism, she focused on the problems people face once they crossed borders.

The story that anchored that warning came from archives: the first chapter of the book introduces a Franco-American settled in the south of France who is threatened with arrest for having sold fake wine. Green found his story in the US national archives. He was born in the US. grew up in the US. had a French father. 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 numerous connections in both the US and France. including senators and other politicians. hoping they would defend him. They did not, for various reasons. “A case of someone who is very transnational, but who still comes up against a lot of barriers,” Green said.

Asked about visibility in Citizens and Those who Leave (2007). Green’s edited volume with François Weil. Tippelskirch pointed out that women—or gender—are rather invisible. Green answered with a sigh: she said they were “gender blind” when they did that project. She said both books—Citizens and Those who Leave and the book on transnationalism (2016) edited with Roger Waldinger—had different historiographical points: more about the state and reinjecting emigration. and the other about long histories of transnationalism including politics and the state. She described how she herself is not one of the first to work on women. gender and immigration. pointing instead to researchers such as Donna Gabaccia (1989) and Mirjana Morokvasic (1984). She said her chapter in Repenser les migrations (“De l’immigré à l’immigrée. ” 2002) evolved from a conference paper she had written in Rouen in 1997 titled “Is History Possible without Women?”.

She said class had been a main category in earlier work; later there was a resurgence of interest in the state. But the state is not gender-blind: it allows entry or departure in gendered ways. She gave examples from labour demand: when states wanted factory workers. they mostly wanted men. except in textile factories; when they needed care workers. they mostly favoured women. She said industrialisation and post-industrialisation thus became gendered in terms of labour needs, shaping state immigration policies.

That fed directly into Tippelskirch’s question about gender in limiting transnationalism. Green agreed and argued that transnationalism’s gender component has been under-theorised. She said the term “immigration” has long been imagined to refer to poor. young. working men. and “transnationalism” initially analysed wealthy businessmen travelling with multiple passports. Gender matters too because who is perceived as transnational is shaped by terminology: women were not initially thought of as part of this elite class. though they are increasingly so.

She said care workers fit transnational behaviour perfectly—going back and forth with elaborate rotation systems of replacing one another in the labour market—yet until recently the term “transnational” was not used for them. “This is a problem of terminology and conceptualisation. ” she said. adding that more work is needed to better integrate different classes and gender into transnationalism.

Throughout the conversation, she also returned to her own role as a bridge between disciplines and national traditions. Tippelskirch described Green as an “expat” or “an American historian working in France. ” and asked whether she sees herself as a mediator between scientific cultures. Green said she did her PhD at the University of Chicago and came to France to do research. staying while maintaining intellectual ties to the US. She described how her first conversations in immigration history were with American scholars of the new social history of immigration. including those interested in women and gender. She named Donna Gabaccia, Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch as friends beyond the Academy.

In France. she said debates about women’s and gender history started around the time she was invited to a seminar at EHESS with. among others. Michelle Perrot. Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch. She said a time lag existed between the two countries. but differences were not ultimately so great: similar issues were being debated around similar points in time.

She acknowledged being “more involved” in those debates due to timing. while feeling that intersectionality had always been part of their considerations “avant la lettre.” She recalled that in the late 1960s in Madison. women’s groups were discussing the Vietnam War and women’s rights. while women of colour were already asking what race changes. She said sexuality is now a major topic in migration studies as well as women’s and gender history. and it has led to many new questions previously neglected. In her view, new questions aren’t the only questions to ask, but they are always thought-provoking.

She closed by saying she has been lucky to end up at EHESS, calling it an inspiring intellectual environment. “In my case, I’m lucky: immigration has been good for me!”

In the end. the interview read like a map of Green’s scholarly life—workers and elites. women and gender. prefixes and paradigms. But it was also something more personal: a refusal to let knowledge age into irrelevance. and a belief that what came before can still carry information we are too quick to throw away.

Nancy L. Green migration studies gender history transnationalism France United States EHESS garment industry elite migration citizenship transatlantic labour migration Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration