Expulsion or Differential Inclusion? Governing Undocumented Migrants in France
This chapter examines the apparent paradox of French deportation policy: although thousands of undocumented migrants are arrested and detained for deportation, the process often goes uncompleted, as most migrants are never actually deported. But the failu
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In France, the deportation of undocumented migrants has always been represented in public discourse as the solution to all the threats undocumented migrants are said to pose.1 These may be threats to the public order, linked to representations of undocumented migrants’ “dubious morality” or “dangerous” political or trade union engagement. Or they may be threats to the labor market and the social welfare system, where undocumented migrants are believed to benefit without contributing. With these threats in mind, deportation policy would seem to respond both to a security imperative and to the need to protect the national economy. Curiously, however, deportation is also presented in political discourse as a way of better integrating regular migrants, who will not have to contend with undocumented migrants for the limited resources devoted to integration programs and social assistance. In this sense, some argue that deportation, insofar as it mitigates the problems associated S. Le Courant (*) Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, LESC (CNRS- Université Paris Nanterre), Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_10
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with migrant integration, also undercuts the far-right critique of migration. The paradox of the discourse I have just briefly outlined lies in the ruptures it points out and in the continuities it suggests. On the one hand, two populations are opposed in the public debate regarding the legality of their stay: undocumented and regular migrants. On the other hand, links are established between old migrant populations and new ones, the presence of whom has to be restricted. This distinction has not to do with legal criteria, but with the assimilation of populations on religious, national, ethnic or racial grounds. The deportation policy, which is justified by the fight against the extremes, takes up the latter’s categories of thought. The conflation between regular and irregular migrants and their French descendants regularly resurfaces in public debate. Migration is therefore the point of convergence between external borders and internal boundaries; the former legally separating territories, the latter—which are a legacy of colonial times—distinguishing social groups. The illegalization of newcomers is related to the racialization of those already present in the national territory (Fassin 2011), but migrants are seen as a “problem” that should always be dealt with on its own. Over the last two decades, the French state has embraced managerial logics, entailing greater reliance on statistics and quantitative measures. Between 2004 and 2012, the projected number of deportations rose from 15,000 to 28,000 and eventually to 35,000. During the 2007 presidential campaign, the deportation of 40,000 “clandestins” (“clandestine migrants”) was among the promises of the candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Deploying figures in political discou
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