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ABSTRACT
Concerns with ‘vulnerability’ increasingly proliferate in global and regional pacts, international and domestic legislations, and policy discourses and practices regarding migration and international protection. Also in France, vulnerability governance has made its inroads, and policy documents hail vulnerability considerations as a strengthening of the politics of reception and integration of asylum seekers and a means to improve accommodation and care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, I argue that vulnerability governance, situated within the context of securitization of migration and budget constraints in the reception system, leads to a ‘differential inclusion’, which is partial, conditional and precarious. By examining the understanding and operationalization of vulnerability within French migration legislation, policies, and governance practices, the study exposes how normative constructs of gender and sexuality inform the identification and hierarchization of vulnerable persons. Ethnographic evidence illustrates how these norms are perpetuated by governance actors, including civil society, and sometimes strategically mobilized or internalized by asylum seekers in their quest for recognition and assistance. In conclusion, the article highlights how protection-seeking migrants also contest the authorities’ understanding and operationalization of vulnerability. Through protests and legal actions, they expose the state’s role in producing and differentially distributing vulnerability through abandonment and destitution.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank research participants in Marseille, researcher Pascaline Chappart for gathering and reflecting on the data material with me and Marry-Anne Karlsen for valuable input to the analysis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Structure de premier accueil des demandeurs d’asile (SPADA)
2 The governance of international migration relies on different and often overlapping categories, with the most basic distinction being made between ‘voluntary’ migrants (economic, irregular), and ‘forced’ migrants (asylum seekers, refugees). While migration scholarship has shown these categories to be deeply problematic, their embedment in law and policy nevertheless makes them socially effective categories, including within the domain of vulnerability governance (see e.g. Karlsen Citation2023). I use the expression ‘protection seeking migrants’ here to problematize the ways in which these labels are currently used, and to reflect the fact that in this study, our interlocutors were differently positioned in relation to the asylum system; some had pre-registered as asylum seekers and were waiting to file an application, some were waiting for an answer for their application or their appeal, some had been granted a temporary protection, some had their application rejected and had consequently been irregularized, and some had been temporarily regularized under a different status.
3 Guichet Unique pour Demandeurs d'Asile (GUDA).
4 Fieldwork was conducted by Pascaline Chappart and me within the framework of the Horizon202 project PROTECT. (See Chappart Citation2021; Jacobsen and Chappart Citation2022).
5 State operators are public or private bodies entrusted with a public service mission by the State. Placed under the direct control of the State, they are mainly financed by it and contribute to state functions. Despite repeated efforts, local representatives of state authorities were impossible to reach for interviews for this project.
6 Between 2016 and 2020, 38.3% of the total demands for asylum were examined according to the accelerated procedure, and in 2021 46%.
7 Schéma national d’accueil des demandeurs d’asile et d’intégration des réfugiés et du dispositif d’orientation régionale (2021–2023) and the Arrêté relatif à l’actualisation du schéma régional d’accueil des demandeurs d’asile et des réfugiés pour la période de 2020 à 2022. See also Jacobsen (Citation2020) on the lack of assistance offered to asylum seekers in the gap between pre-registration at the first reception centre and the GUDA appointment.
8 Although France is a signatory to these compacts, they are not explicitly mentioned in the French national legal framework or policy plans.
9 Arrêté du 23 octobre 2015 relatif au questionnaire de détection des vulnérabilités des demandeurs d'asile prévu à l'article L. 744-6 du code de l'entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d'asile. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000031400890
10 See for instance https://asile-en-france.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9:la-vulnerabilite&catid=8&showall=1&Itemid=117
11 The Service Plus is a complement to housing structures in Bouches-du-Rhône, providing hotel nights to persons oriented there via the emergency housing telephone 115 or the first reception centre for asylum seekers.
12 Baudier and Masson-Diez (Citation2023) similarly note that gender as a criterion is never questioned in the extra-institutional spaces of reception and hospitality for minors that they researched in Marseille and other French cities.
13 N.H. and others v. France.
14 An instruction issued by the Holland-government specified that during the evacuation of bidonvilles, ‘special attention should be paid to the most vulnerable persons’ in the provision of shelter and material care (Caseau Citation2022). In the case described here, this provision intersects with the assessment of asylum seeker’s vulnerability.
15 During the pandemic, the local emergency housing dispositive in Marseille was expanded. While the effort did reduce the number of people sleeping in the streets, the solutions remained highly provisional (short term, with repeated renewals) and according to our interlocutors seemed not to have a led to a change in the narrow understanding and operationalization of vulnerability (cf. also Marsaud and Bonis Citation2020).
16 Allocation Demandeur d’Asile, (ADA).