Bonds, Bounds, and Borders: Crafting Hospitality with Unauthorized Migrants in Southern France

Abstract

This article analyzes the everyday politics of migrant hospitality in rural Southern France. Drawing on four years of fieldwork alongside benevolent residents hosting unauthorized migrants at their home or volunteering in migrant shelters, I consider how residents attempted to make up for the state's abandonment of migrant lives, the ethical dilemmas which they faced in so doing, and the political solutions they explored. Benevolent residents built infrastructures of solidarity and turned homes and shelters into sanctuaries where unauthorized migrants could stay without risking deportation. But hospitality was never as simple as hosts wanted it to be. Through an analysis of everyday life at residents’ homes, in migrant shelters, and in self-organized squats, I trace the forms of migrant subjectivity that hospitality allowed for; the social distinctions it maintained, and the ambivalent ties it forged between migrants and residents. But hospitality encounters also redefined the relationship that residents entertained with a state which they perceived as deficient, and whose failure to care for migrant lives had left them little choice but to care for migrants themselves. As unwilling hosts, they attempted to carve pockets of hospitality in the margins of border regimes.