3A third proposition animates Sayad’s tireless inquiries: like other key processes of group making and unmaking, migration has for requisite collective dissimulation and social duplicity. Emigration, and later immigration, operates in the way it does only to the extent that it continually mystifies and misrecognizes itself for what it is - or, to put it more precisely, the magical denegation (Verneinung) of the objective reality of migration is part and parcel of its full objectivity, its "double truth." Thus, throughout the twentieth century, the French authorities, Algerian society, and the migrants themselves colluded in concocting a triple lie that allowed all three to justify to themselves the trek of millions of peasants from the Maghrib to the hexagon: that migration was provisional and transitory, that it was determined solely by the quest for labor ("I came here to work so I drown myself in work," intones a Kabyle factory hand), and that it was politically neutral and without civic consequence on either side of the Mediterranean (Sayad 1991: 17-18). All three of these beliefs were glaringly and continually disputed, if not refuted, by social reality, yet none of the parties to the Algerian migration was willing to face that reality. Emigration is never an "export of raw labor power and nothing more" (Sayad 1999a: 20) because, as a "total social fact" in Marcel Mauss’s (1990) sense of the term, it disrupts the whole array of institutions that make up the originating society. Conversely, at the other end, immigrant workers are but exceptionally "birds of passage," to recall Michael Piore’s (1977) well-known book, for they too are changed in and by migration: they become irrevocably distanced and dis-located from their originating milieu, losing a place in their native circle of honor without securing one in their new setting; they acquire this false and disjointed "double-consciousness"6that is source of both succor and pain; they are consumed by doubt, guilt and self-accusation, worn down by an "unjust and uncertain" battle with their own children, these "sociological bastards" who personify the horrifying impossibility of the "return home" (Sayad 1988). A retired Algerian laborer settled in a working-class banlieue of Paris puts it pithily: France, I’m gonna tell you, is a low-life woman, like a whore. Without you know it, she encircles you, she takes to seducing you until you’ve fallen for her and then she sucks your blood, she makes you wait on her hand and foot. (...) She is a sorceress. She has taken so many men with her... she has a way of keeping you a prisoner. Yes, she is a prison, a prison from which you cannot get out, a prison for life.
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