« Gouvernement par la peur, insécurisation lucrative : une histoire de la Suisse moderne depuis les marges immigrées » / "Government through Fear, Lucrative Insecuritization: A History of Modern Switzerland from the Immigrant Margins" || Jury de thèse / Thesis Committee: Keith Krause, Elisabeth Prügl & Stefano Guzzini || Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement / Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), 2015-2020

From the end of WWII to the 1973 oil crisis, the advanced industrial states of Western Europe recruited large numbers of foreign workers as a response to the labor shortages induced by the postwar production boom. Their migration policies differed, however, in significant ways. Switzerland stood out for its approach to foreign workers’ integration and settlement, which was the most restrictive in the region. The central instrument of this policy was the seasonal status, a distinctly coercive legal construct that imposed, among other restrictions, a strict ban on family reunification for foreign workers.

The research project aims to uncover the multiple impacts of this ban on women seasonal workers and wives of seasonal workers, particularly in the context of border medical inspections and in domains such as reproductive decision-making, parenting and participation in the labor market. The project seeks to enrich our understanding of their experiences by comparing them with those of women who migrated to France, another major labor-importing state which however favored settlement and family reunification at the time. To ensure comparability, this research focuses on Spanish migration to Switzerland and France between 1961 and 1973.

The project is deeply interdisciplinary as it borrows theoretical and empirical insights from political science, political economy, sociology and international relations while mobilizing oral history and archival methods. The project is also motivated by a sense of urgency since it is now nearly the last chance to collect and valorize the narratives of these women who migrated in the postwar period.