Labour Market Integration of Young People from the French Overseas Départements: At Home or in Metropolitan France?

Since the mid-twentieth century, France’s overseas départements (département d’outre-mer, DOM) have seen intense migration, with criss-crossing fl ows of DOM native-borns leaving and returning, alongside migrants from France and other countries. While these migration fl ows have little impact on the total population size of the DOMs, they have signifi cant effects on the population structure by age, sex and origin, as well as on youth employment and unemployment. The salient feature of these migration fl ows is that they almost exclusively involve people of working age. They therefore alter the composition of the working-age population in the DOMs, with a strong impact in terms of educational levels, employment rates and unemployment rates of the populations concerned. This article endeavours to identify the factors underpinning these fl ows. It focuses on selection mechanisms, actors’ strategies and new competition on the labour market. The aim is to shed light on the complexity of these migration fl ows, to take account of the dynamics at play between mobility, education and employment of DOM native-borns, to identify their conditions of integration in the place of destination and to assess how much those who return home have really benefi ted from migration.