The author draws three conclusions from this case study on telephone use by about thirty immigrant families in the Parisian region. The first is that the telephone has become the main mode of communication with the family in the home country, well ahead of other forms of interaction considered to be emotionally less appropriate (letters, oral messages, recorded tapes). The second is that these families, usually thought to be at a loss faced with the offering of new technologies, have, on the contrary, taken advantage of price reductions related to competition between telecom operators. They have even been leaders in innovation by adopting the mobile telephone on a massive scale very early on. Lastly, the rift between telephone use for communication with ascendants - on the corded phone - and descendants - via the mobile phone - seems to show that telephony is the medium for two very different logics: interaction related to codes of family honour and, secondly, calculation and rationality related to the need to solve specific problems posed by the environment.