Abstract
As most western countries, France has witnessed a general increase of legal control over unauthorized immigration in the past years. This crackdown on so-called undocumented foreigners resulted in a wide recourse to police round-ups, identity checks and custody, or the development of computerized files of foreign nationals designed to “secure the border” and detect unwanted immigrants on the French territory ( Weil 2005;Guiraudon 2000;Hollifield 2004). Among those measures, the deportation process has been particularly enhanced, as it provides the most direct and clear enforcement of the “social closure” separating nationals from foreigners. If deportation is, indeed, a “bordering institution”, the border that is at stake here is not merely geographic—it is as well a political, a legal, and more broadly a social one, setting those who may exercise the ordinary rights of citizens apart from those who may not (DeGenova and Peutz 2010) .
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- 1.
I will here use the French expression centre de rétention administrative, and sometimes its English equivalent, “immigration detention centre”. Detained immigrants will be referred to as “detainees”, although this common English term fails to render the French legal distinction between retenus—foreign nationals locked up in non-penal facilities to await their deportation—and détenus—i.e. penal convicts serving a sentence in prison.
- 2.
This time is usually used for the booking of plane or boat tickets by a centralized immigration police agency, and the issuance of consulate international passes when the foreigner has no valid passport (as happens rather frequently).
- 3.
Substantial information on this organization and the recent intervention of other groups will be given further in the contribution. As the acronym (which stands for Comité inter-mouvements pour l’aide aux déplacés et evacués) has now become a proper, feminine name (“La Cimade”), I will spell it this way here.
- 4.
Starting in the early 1970s, administrative courts started repealing immigration orders which lacked sufficient and convincing grounds, urging the Home Office to legalize those foreigners who were considered as “undeportable” by a judge. As measures of removal were developed in the 1980 and 1990s, they where then systematically accompanied by the possibility for the deported immigrant to take legal action against his deportation order before an administrative court. It should be reminded here that for historical reasons, the French legal system includes a so-called “double system of jurisdictions”, which supposes that conflicts opposing a private person to a state administration cannot be examined by the judicial power, but should be reviewed by special “administrative courts” (Tribunaux administratifs and Cours administratives d’appel), which have now become major actors of the protection of fundamental rights against government rule.
- 5.
These organizations are Forum Réfugiés and France Terre d’Asile (two organizations specialized in the relief of asylum seekers), the Association service social familial migrants (Assfam), and the Ordre de Malte, two organizations working for the social relief of immigrants and, for the latter, for medical care in the Third World. All five organizations intervene alone in five separate sets of detention centers, regrouped on a regional basis. Cimade still intervenes on eight centers out of 25 nationwide, and in four other centers located in the French “overseas territories”.
- 6.
Members of the Cimade were indeed present in various internment camps to assist the detainees up to 1941, and resumed the same type of activity in French internment camps during the Algerian war in the early 1960s.
- 7.
The expression “free circulation” [libre-circulation] was itself used by members of the staff and officials in the center.
- 8.
The total number of deportation orders issued in France indeed went from 49 124 in 2002 to 94 693 in 2009, for a relatively stable rate of execution of those measures (20.5 % of issued deportation orders where actually enforced in 2002, against 22.2 % in 2009) (SGCICI 2011).
- 9.
On a total of 190 cases of reconduites à la frontière, only eight legal motions were filed against the deportation order (4 %). In 100 cases (53 % of the total), no intervention (whether legal motion or else) was started by the lawyers (Fischer 2013).
- 10.
Interestingly enough, Hanna’s justifications are significantly close to some self-justifications of street-level bureaucrats in immigration services (“I just stick to what is legal”). For French examples, see (Spire 2008).
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Fischer, N. (2012). Negotiating Deportations: An Ethnography of the Legal Challenge of Deportation Orders in a French Immigration Detention Centre. In: Anderson, B., Gibney, M., Paoletti, E. (eds) The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation. Immigrants and Minorities, Politics and Policy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5864-7_8
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