Sans Papiers

"Undocumented people" In his essay, Broken Lives, Broken Strategies, Zygmunt Bauman introduced the notion of "strategies of ' to point at the preoccupation with "quality of life" which is central to modem societies. As far as "undocumented people" are concerned, Godfried Engbersen perfers to use the concept of "strategies of residence", which insists on what is really at stake for illegal migrants : prolonging their stay in the Netherlands so that regularization may occur. Four main strategies are discussed on the empiric basis of interviews with 169 illegal migrants living in Rotterdam and information taken from police files : 1) mobilizing social capital, 2) entering into a (sham) marriage, 3) manipulating one's personal identity, 4) operating strategically in the public space. Undocumented people can be organized into a hierarchy according to their endowment with social capital : people who benefit from a substantial and lasting help from their family/friends/own ethnic community can be found at the top of this ethnic stratification, while migrants who are isolated and therefore dependant on market relations are at the bottom. The latters, who have to manage on their own, also have difficultes in entering a residence marriage, which anyway proves to be problematic for all illegal migrants because of their inferior social position. They often have to manipulate their personal identity, either borrowing authentic documents or using false papers ; they might also chose a strategic nationality or simply obliterate their identity by destroying their own authentic documents to prevent deportation. In this last case, they might assume tasks that make them "visible" in drug-traffic : as they cannot be deported, they are not very likely to be arrested. But some others undocumented people prefer to operate carefully in the public space. Clandestinity might therefore be regarded as a mastersatus : secrecy determines the social relations of illegal migrants. Some unexpected effects of the recent laws regarding foreigners (focused on identification and control) might thus be discussed : Europe-Panoptikon (this image shall be preferred to the old metaphor of Europe-Fortress) guards the "system frontier" (rather than the physical frontiers) of rich welfare states, so that she keeps criminalizing and clandestinizing illegal migrants and eventually generates its own criminality.