Saint Martin’s Change of Political Status: Inscribing Borders and Immigration Laws onto Geographical Space

Anthropologists often analyze globalization as the circulation of goods, people, and ideas that triggers the decrease in nation-state prerogatives and the opening of nation states’ borders. In such an analysis, migrations are transnational: people move back and forth between their home country and the host country. Economic and demographic change in St. Martin seems to be a model for the usual scholarly approach to study globalization.