Paperwork and other administrative practices have a bearing on this book’s central question in several significant ways. Papers need to be in order to finalise one’s pension arrangements and to fix the date on which payments begin. Valid papers are required to receive healthcare, which is a key consideration in post-retirement residence decisions, as will be elaborated in Chap. 4. Papers are also necessary to prove eligibility for means-tested social security benefits. In all of these paperwork scenarios a key finding emerges, namely that the legal requirements of welfare state inclusion place significant temporal and territorial demands on hostel residents, a process which I label ‘timetabling’. In other words, hostel residents are required to be in certain places at certain times, or for certain durations of time. Saulo Cwerner describes the legal and bureaucratic requirements which migrants face in such situations as ‘heteronomous times’ (Cwerner 2001). “Heteronomous times are to a large degree inescapable, and it is far more difficult to get rid of their grip” (ibid: 21).

These timetabling effects of the welfare state were first introduced in Chap. 2, via the notion of ‘organisational biographies’. In the present chapter I will begin by examining the implications for late-in-life mobility of these temporal and territorial rules of access to the welfare state. Anoeshka Gehring has coined the term ‘legal gates’ to describe the “everyday rules and regulations at different local, national, and supranational levels which facilitate or impede human mobility between one jurisdiction and another” (Gehring 2015). Importantly, legal gates may also enforce mobility. I build on this perspective by arguing that while such legal regulations affect all those living in modern welfare states, citizens and non-citizens alike, the ‘non-standard’ lifecourse typical of migrant workers (Bommes 2000) results in demands being issued to them by welfare state institutions which non-migrants are generally not called upon to answer. As will be elaborated, many of these problematic biographical aspects are documented in administrative paperwork, such as pension records showing later entry to the French job market, and inaccurate or conflicting dates recorded on proofs of identity. At other times migrant workers’ biographies are problematic precisely because they are not documented, for example when unscrupulous employers do not declare migrant staff on their payrolls.

Importantly, these non-standard trajectories and documents, although set in motion from birth and continuing into adulthood and employment, only become critical at retirement: prior to this, they do not have a major influence on life chances and outcomes. This gives credence to the argument made earlier that retirement is a critical juncture, heralding a stage of life where papers become more important, and – for migrants – more problematic. Hostel residents are required to undergo a shift whereby papers replace work as the basis for their social identity, as the epigraph to this chapter eloquently evoked.

Likewise, retirement also heralds a juncture insofar as it signals an end to the sedentary constraint of participation in the labour market. In this regard, the hostel residents’ back-and-forth trips at retirement are problematic. Together, their suspect papers and transnational mobility rub up against the temporal and territorial logics of the welfare state. As will be discussed in Sect. 3.3, this leads to enforcement from state officials, aimed at controlling the residents’ comings-and-goings between France and countries of origin. Nonetheless, my focus on the state in this chapter is not intended to downplay the importance of less formal sources of social protection for migrants (Faist and Bilecen 2015), and indeed it will be shown that networks of friends and family may be mobilised by hostel residents to counteract and resist the bureaucratic control of their movements. Nor do I wish – in stressing the timetabling effect of the welfare state – to obscure hostel residents’ agency and resourcefulness in accessing ‘assemblages’ of social protection which operate in places of origin and transnationally (Bilecen and Barglowski 2015; Levitt et al. 2016). Such assemblages may incorporate provision from the state, the market, the third sector and kin/friendship networks. The salience of agency in these latter venues will be elaborated elsewhere in the book – in Chap. 4 on healthcare, in Chap. 5. on family ties and in Chap. 6 on hometown associations.

3.1 Timetabled Lives at Retirement

Early on in fieldwork I became aware that the issue of paperwork was of central importance in the older hostel residents’ decision-making about late-in-life return. In particular, three empirical manifestations of timetabling were identified as crucial by hostel residents. These are (i) the French old-age pension system; (ii) eligibility conditions of ‘regular and effective residence’ for social security benefits; and (iii) the annual tax declaration form. I will take each in turn.

State pension systems are one clear example of timetabling. Timetabling logics are manifestly at play insofar as basic state pensions set minimum retirement ages and incentivise people to work longer. In France, the ‘general regime’Footnote 1 basic state pension is based on the Bismarckian principle of ‘pay-as-you-go’ contributions from employers and employees (Thompson 2008). It is administered by the national old age insurance fund (Caisse nationale d’assurance vieillesse, hereafter CNAV). An individual’s annual pension is calculated on the basis of the average 25 best years’ salary. Those having contributed to their pension fund for the equivalent duration of 164 trimesters’ full time employment, i.e., 41 years, are entitled to an annual pension worth 50% of this average salary calculation. A lower duration of contributions reduces the rate proportionally, with the lowest band being 25%. The youngest age at which one can begin drawing one’s pension is 60 years (62 years for those born after 1955): this minimum age limit is waived if the insured person started working in their teens and had a long career, or for those who are physically incapacitated. As an incentive to work longer,Footnote 2 whatever the duration of contributions, a person who continues working until the age of 65 (67 for those born after 1955) automatically enjoys the full rate of 50% (CNAV 2016).

While pension regimes often stipulate such temporal conditions, territorial demands (i.e., eligibility based on place of residence) are less-and-less a requirement for drawing a French pension, thanks to numerous bilateral social security agreements operating between France and third countries. Under such agreements, the pension is an exportable asset to which every non-resident pensioner has rights on the same basis as if he or she were residing in France. In addition, pensionsable periods of employment in both countries are aggregated.Footnote 3 The only condition for foreigners is that they are in possession of a residence permit (of any duration of validity) at the time they ask to start receiving their pension. However, this request can be effected from abroad: one no longer needs to be physically present in France to start drawing one’s pension (CNAV 2004: 24).

A second manifestation of timetabling is seen in the eligibility criteria for means-tested social security benefits. These are to be distinguished from ‘pay-as-you-go’ social security provisions for old-age, maternity and unemployment insofar as the former are not financed through personal social security contributions but from general taxation, hence their ‘non-contributory’ designation. An important form of social security for older hostel residents is the Solidarity Payment for Older People (Allocation de solidarité aux personnes âgées, ASPA), an old-age income benefit colloquially known as the minimum vieillesse. Individuals aged 65 and over in receipt of modest pensions are eligible for the minimum vieillesse, which tops up one’s general regime pension to a minimum old-age income, set at €708.95 per month in 2010 when research for this project was completed.

Receiving non-contributory social security benefits like the minimum vieillesse is almost always conditional upon observing minimum periods of residence in the country paying the benefit. Even in the European Union, which has made great efforts to streamline the transferability of welfare entitlements between different member states for its mobile citizens, non-contributory social security benefits fall outside the remit of the transferability legislation (EC Regulation 883/2004). This has very clear timetabling implications at retirement, both for older EU citizens contemplating mobility within the EU (see Gehring 2015) and for third-country nationals who may wish to divide their time between Europe and their countries of origin (see Harrysson et al. 2016). For hostel residents who wish to claim social security benefits, France must remain their ‘regular and effective’ place of residence. This in part explains the preference for back-and-forth trips (va-et-vient) among the elderly hostel residents, so that they can accumulate the required duration of residence in France. Up until 2007 the qualifying period for ‘regular and effective’ residence varied considerably across the different benefit agencies in France.Footnote 4 As a result of these variable interpretations, in the past the benefits agencies:

basically did what they pleased, which is to say that it was enough that the person left for two months and they would say to him “you are no longer resident here, you have transferred your residence outside France so as a result we are no longer going to pay your benefits.” Yet it wasn’t true: the person had just gone on holiday (Sandrine, legal advisor, migrant rights association).

A prime ministerial decreeFootnote 5 of 2007 standardised some of these disparate practices, stipulating a 6 month minimum residence period for most non-contributory benefits, such as family benefits, health cover and the minimum vieillesse. Some migrant rights organisations have given a cautious welcome to this partially standardised definition of residence. However, during my meeting at a Moroccan consulate in France, officials were under no illusion as to what the 2007 decree means for their elderly compatriots in France and the timetabling pressures to which they are subject: “Instead of spending time with their children, back home in the warmth, they are obliged to stay six months [in France] in precarious conditions in order to get very modest sums of money.” Furthermore two exceptions to the residence rule continue to exist: the APL housing benefit, on which many residents depend, requires 8 months’ residence, while disability allowance stipulates 9 months’ residence. These inconsistencies are potentially confusing for hostel residents.

A third manifestation of timetabling relates to a particularity of the French tax system. Every year in May, all people whose principal residence is in France are required to complete and sign their Tax Declaration (Déclaration des Impôts). Crucially, the form is only sent to addresses in April and must be returned by the end of May. A new online tax declaration system is presently being instituted, but at the time this research was conducted only postal returns were possible. The requirement to be at one’s domicileFootnote 6 in France at that time was therefore an exemplary manifestation of welfare state timetabling. The tax declaration is a sine qua non of French administrative documentation since it is used as a proof, not only of residence (i.e., residence for tax purposes), but also of income, and therefore crucial for proving eligibility for means-tested non-contributory benefits. It is entirely unsurprising then that the period March–May was the peak period in terms of hostel occupancy while I was carrying out fieldwork. Many residents mentioned this as a motive for their periodic return trips, and hostel managers too were very aware of the importance of this time of year:

The period when they all come back is when there is the tax declaration to do. They have to be here to do the declaration and sign the papers. Apart from this period then which is March-May, there is no other peak time, it keeps ticking over (Denis, hostel manager).

March–May was also a peak period for the weekly advice service on social and legal rights which Germain, a volunteer for an anti-poverty NGO, held in the hostel where I was resident. A session which I observed in the last week of May was very well-attended, with upwards of 30 men waiting in line to be seen, almost all of them older residents. By contrast, in the following weeks which I observed, very few residents passed by to see Germain and there were no queues to speak of. I asked Germain why this might be, and he answered quite simply that many residents had gone home, after completing their tax declaration.

3.2 Migration, the Welfare State, and Non-standard Biographies

Older immigrants are not alone in experiencing the timetabling demands of the welfare state. Temporal and territorial conditions of inclusion apply in principle to all those who live and grow old in European welfare states. However, in the following section I will argue that there are biographical elements in the hostel residents’ passage to retirement which do equate with ‘systemic’ discrimination. As Michael Bommes puts it, those aspects of the life course which for non-migrant national citizens are normally taken as given “can no longer be presupposed” for migrants (Bommes 2000: 95). Rather, migrants’ lives often deviate considerably from the standard assumed life course as structured by the welfare state (i.e., education and preparation for employment, followed by prompt entry to the labour market, child rearing, and retirement). Below I will chart some of the principal divergences, many of which are recorded in administrative documents.

The Time Factor

At retirement, migrants tend to have lower pension incomes than their non-migrant contemporaries. Generally not emigrating until their mid-20s or later, labour migrants of the post-WWII cohort have had shorter careers than their non-migrant co-workers, and consequently at retirement have amassed fewer contributions to pension schemes (Bommes 2000). On average, hostel residents were aged 25.5 years at the time of their first entry to France (Gallou 2005).Footnote 7 Migrant workers in France are also statistically more vulnerable to work-related accidents and ill-health (Alidra et al. 2003), leading to enforced absence from work which may likewise diminish their pension contributions.

While Bommes based his analysis on the German welfare system, his point about the generally shorter pension contribution periods which migrants accumulate holds for other countries, at least in Western Europe. Dörr and Faist (1997) show that in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, “the time factor – duration of contribution to the pension funds – plays an essential role … [I]n all systems migrants are usually discriminated against because they tend to start contributing to the funds later than natives” (Dörr and Faist 1997: 414; see also Harrysson et al. 2016).Footnote 8 This was prominent in the testimony of my own respondents. Two particularities for migrants contributing to the French pension system are: (i) their comparatively late entry into the job market (Gallou 2005); and (ii) the guarantee of a pension at the full rate of 50% if retirement is deferred until 65 years, regardless of the duration of prior contributions (see Sect. 1). The latter measure provides a strong incentive for many men to continue working in France until this full-rate pension is secured, as my fieldnotes record:

The reason Saleem (60, Tiznit, Morocco) hasn’t taken retirement yet is because he hasn’t got enough trimesters for his pension – now you need the equivalent of 41 years’ contributions. Which clearly means you need to have started work when you were 20 or thereabouts – something which clearly disfavours these immigrants, who arrived in their mid-20s generally.

Ibrahima (59, Gorgol, Mauritania) is almost 60 years old (although he looks more like 50!) He won’t take his pension for another five years in order to benefit from the full rate.

Amadou (64, Goudiri, Senegal) will be taking his pension very shortly, in February of next year. Again, the reason for delaying is in order to benefit from the full rate.

Few men saw many advantages in working beyond this age. When we met, Mehdi (64, Chlef, Algeria) was planning to retire later in the year, when he turned 65. He had heard that if one works past 65 the authorities now add a small bonus to one’s pension (surcote), but “it’s only 3 %, so if I have a pension of €1000 per month that’s only going to be €30 extra for one more year worked. It’s not worth it.”

Employment Factors

Sector of employment can also be a critical vector of systemic disadvantage. Some sectors heavily dependent on migrant labour, such as construction, are particularly exposed to recession and unemployment. By contrast, migrants working in manufacturing and heavy industry – sectors dominated by large companies where there is more job security – are often the beneficiaries of substantial pensions. Furthermore, larger companies are much more likely to observe employment laws requiring them to declare employees for tax and social security purposes. Those who worked in construction, on the other hand, were at high risk of not being declared to the authorities.Footnote 9 This situation, and the missing pension contributions which it implies, was a feature of much of the grey literature I consulted (Acsé 2011; Unafo 2002), as well as interviews with administrative representatives. Since the French construction sector is characterised by smaller contractors and businesses at high risk of failure during economic downturns, many companies operating in the 1960s and 1970s are now defunct. This makes getting redress for undeclared pension contributions difficult if not impossible, because the company and its records no longer exist. Saleem, a Renault factory worker, commented:

When one works in just one company it’s OK but the guys who worked in several companies, it is more difficult because there are some firms which disappear, which don’t even exist anymore, that’s the thing (Saleem, 60, Tiznit, Morocco).

Certainly, most of my respondents questioned on the matter indicated that those employed in the construction sector were most at risk of not being declared by their employers, and therefore at risk of missing periods in their contribution records. Once again, a timetabling effect operates here, since those with missing periods may feel obliged to work until 65 years, in order to benefit from the full-rate pension. Likewise, given that the French basic pension regime is a contributory system, those with missing periods will have paid less money into the system, resulting in a smaller pension fund at retirement. This situation leads to recourse to old-age income support, as a senior civil servant pointed out in an interview. Discussing the case of the hostel residents, he noted:

Then there are the guys who are on the minimum vieillesse. It’s not that their life has been structured like that, it’s the type of employment, the type of employer which counts. In the steel industry, the guy who has worked 30 years in that, 40 years, he isn’t on the minimum vieillesse. So we have situations which are financially varied and which do not depend in most cases on the working life of the individual. They have often worked for 30 years, but there are cases where they have worked 30 years but they have only been declared to the authorities for five years (…) a few months in one place, a year somewhere else. At any rate it is never clear, especially in the construction industry – there it’s a catastrophe. From the point of view of the contributory pensions, the immigrants who worked in construction often got screwed over. So there we have a particular problem (senior civil servant).

Some of my respondents were indeed missing contributions from their employers, as my fieldnotes record:

(Kemal, 62, Algeria) Arrived in France at the age of 17 in 1963. He worked for carmakers such as Citroen and Chausson, and other places too. He has a basic regime pension at the full rate, but for the complementary pension, ARRCOFootnote 10 are not accepting his five years on [unemployment benefit]. Also discounted is two years he spent working in a factory. ARRCO are really giving him the run-around (l’ARRCO te fait courir), he repeated that several times.

(Issa, 70, Tambacounda, Senegal) He mentioned that there had been a problem with his longest-served employer, a street-cleaning sub-contractor. The company has not been “honest”; they have not paid him his redundancy payment. What complicates things further is that the company is now bankrupt.

(Mehdi, 64, Chlef, Algeria) We talked about his pension contributions record: there is a year working as a ‘temp’ which is missing. The year 1989–1990, this year is missing on the record. But fortunately he has kept all his papers, every paper dating from 1979 (the second time he came to France). He has three bags full of papers in his wardrobe, everything dating from 1979.

These observations illustrate some of the differential outcomes associated with different sectors of employment: the retirement incomes of those who were ‘temping’ or whose former employers have gone out of business are not on an equal footing with those who worked in steady sectors such carmaking. Sector of employment is thus one of the social mechanisms by which inequalities in transnational social protection are produced (Faist and Bilecen 2015). The above fieldnotes also reveal differing levels of agency. Issa has little prospect of justice due to the bankruptcy of his former employer, whereas Mehdi had the foresight to preserve his employment documents and can therefore contest the missing year on his record.

(Mis-) Registration Factors

Systemic disadvantage also occurs through inaccuracies recorded on the documents and proofs of identity which older hostel residents are required to present in everyday life. The inaccuracies contained in these documents stem from two sources: either (i) delayed registration of birth, leading to approximate dates being recorded, or (ii) mis-transcription of names, dates and numbers from one register to another. This has often occurred when documents dating from the colonial period were transcribed into French registers (Hamadache 2002).Footnote 11 Both problems have been most accentuated for those who grew up in rural areas. Generally, the authorities in urban areas under colonial rule were more attentive in observing administrative formalities.

Turning first of all to delayed registration of births and approximate records, I discovered during my conversations with Senegalese elders that many men of their generation did not register for birth certificates or Senegalese identity cards until they had reached the age of 18 or later. Given the long period which had elapsed since birth for those in this situation, many had no accurate idea of the year in which they were born, let alone the month or date. The dates recorded were therefore necessarily based on estimations. After estimating the year of birth, administrators tended to record the month and date of birth as 31 December. Unfortunately, putting the end of the year has disadvantageous timetabling consequences, since it pushes back the date one can start to draw one’s pension to the end of the year.Footnote 12 As Nadia Hamadache notes, “It would without doubt be more just, in these cases, to fix as the date of birth the first of July, which would balance things out” (Hamadache 2002: 22; author’s translation).

Significantly, it was the prospect of emigration which prompted many of my respondents to get registered with the administrative authorities in the first place. Had it not been for this motivation they would have not got registered when they did, as they were perfectly well able to go about their business in places of origin without such proofs of identity. As will be further developed in Chap. 8, it is interesting to observe how the requirements of inclusion in migrants’ destination countries lead to new administrative practices in places of origin.

The causes of delayed registrations and approximate dates of birth are exemplified in my fieldnotes for two respondents, born within a few miles and months of each other around 1948, in Protectorate-era Morocco (Tiznit district). Morocco became independent in 1956.

(…) Lhoussaine arrived in France in 1971. Although his official date of birth is 1st January 1951, he was born before this, although he is less than sure in which year. Perhaps 1948. His father didn’t put him on the livret de famille Footnote 13 because they didn’t want the French authorities to know that the children existed, otherwise they would have been liable for extra taxes and the children could have been liable for conscription.

(…) Badr’s birth certificate states that he is four years younger than his actual age! He was born sometime between 1948 and 1949 – he knows this because his dad married his mum in 1947 and divorced her in 1949! But his father never registered him on a livret de famille or birth certificate (acte de naissance). To be eligible for entry into school when he was a lad, you needed a birth certificate, so what his father did was to make him younger so that he could stay at school longer … His date of birth was put as 1952. So on paper, he is only 57, whereas in reality he is at least 60 years old, and I should add that he looks his age a little. French people, he told me, are amazed when he tells them that he doesn’t have a day or a month for his birthday, but he tells them that, “it’s because of the French – and colonisation – they didn’t do their job correctly!”

Mis-Transcriptions

A second type of inaccuracy found in documents concerns variations in spelling when documents are transcribed, or re-transcribed. Such inaccuracies can be due to simple human errors such as spelling mistakes and inverted first and last names. They have also been caused when bureaucrats in newly independent states rectified or standardised the civil registries inherited from colonial administrations. What results is lack of congruence between an individual’s pre-migration records dating from the colonial era, and the contemporary records held by the newly independent state. Proving who one is then becomes even more difficult, and the French authorities – confronted with two different sets of documents, “admit serious doubts about the veracity of these documents due to a fear of fraud” (Hamadache 2002: 22; author’s translation). The testimony of Jacques, manager of a local branch of the national old age insurance fund (CNAV), is illuminating of the official mindset:

They arrived in France like that – Mohammed son of Mohammed, born in 1940 – and then ten years later, he comes back to say “I’m no longer called Mohammed son of Mohammed, but I have a surname and a first name and a date of birth,” and you have to start all over again, you have to modify the whole record, and re-matriculate it, and give it a new number, making a fusion of the two, the old one and the new one. So that is when we get all sorts of delays! (Jacques, branch manager, CNAV)

Sometimes, the names and dates given in one set of documents do not match with a second set of documents. One example, taken from my fieldwork in Dembancané, Senegal, is the surname Cissoko: variants of this spelling include Sissoko, Sissokho, Cissokho, Sisoko and so on. Such inconsistencies of spelling, along with the inexactitude of dates of birth, have historically caused major issues for Dembancané men when dealing with the French authorities. In short, these complications have been a factor in welfare state exclusion, at least temporarily (i.e., as long as it takes to correct these mis-transcriptions). “In effect, the variations in the re-transcription of names and the changes to surnames singularly complicates the constitution of dossiers” (Acsé 2011). This complication was echoed by Djimé (Dembancané, Senegal)Footnote 14:

You know that the Senegalese registers, in the past, well, there weren’t even any surnames or first names: it’s that which makes things complicated (…) They didn’t pay attention when writing down the names.

Rectifying these inconsistencies and inaccuracies can be a long and costly process (Samaoli 2007), requiring no little time and money if back-and-forth travel is necessary in order to present one’s correct credentials to bureaucrats in both countries, or attend court judgements, and so on (Hamadache 2002). Such toing-and-froing between administrations in both countries is another example of how states may enforce mobility on the least resourceful (Gehring 2015). For those who are older or whose health is failing, the burden of going to court (and the time that will take) may simply not be worth it. Badr, whose remark about French colonial administrators not doing their job correctly was quoted above, does plan to get his papers corrected at some point. Presently however he hesitates because it is a time-consuming and complex administrative process. First he needs to find 12 witnesses who will vouch that he was born in 1948 (this is stipulated by Moroccan law, since he needs a new Moroccan birth certificate). Then the case passes to a tribunal and a judge will make a decision. Of course, this is only the Moroccan side of the story, and he is well aware that it would take far longer than his once-a-year month-long holiday in Morocco to arrange, which is why he has not done it yet. It will then be necessary to change all the documentation and records held by the French authorities too.

Self-Inflicted Problems and Timetabling

Other problematic biographical records are more accurately portrayed as self-inflicted, generating considerable suspicion from administrative authorities. There are three scenarios to note here: (i) those who earlier concealed their true age in order to emigrate to France; (ii) those who ‘share’ what should be a unique social security identifier with undocumented kinsmen and/or compatriots; and (iii) those who have inattentively (or unwittingly) discarded important proofs of employment and income.

I described in the previous sub-section how children were not always punctually registered with the colonial authorities, leading to inaccuracies and approximations in terms of dates of birth. In addition to these uncertainties, some individuals had a vested interest in falsifying dates of birth, since lying about one’s age could facilitate entry to France. Jacques Barou relays the testimony of one such individual: “I came to France in 1963, I must have been 16. But on the papers I declared 26” (Barou 2001: 13). As noted earlier, recruiters preferred to hire men in their mid-20s who were in the prime of life. For the same reason, other may have lied to become younger ‘on paper’. Several decades later, the consequences of such actions catch up with those concerned. While administratively-speaking an individual might be 60 and still 5 years away from drawing a pension at the full rate, in reality he is aged 70 and still engaged in manual work. Hamid (70, Taroudant, Morocco) recalled that one of his workmates at the car factory was in this category, remarking how tough it was for him towards the end of his career.

A second self-inflicted complication arises when several acquaintances, often members of the same family, ‘share’ one set of documents between them. This is most likely to occur when one or more of their number does not possess valid residence papers and permits for work. To resolve this problem, they lend each other the same valid set of papers, and as a result, each one begins to contribute social security and pension contributions to the same account. Jacques (branch manager, CNAV) claimed that this tactic was most prevalent in West African hostels where several male members belonging to an extended family from one village may reside, since the postal address always matches. As he elaborated:

We also have big problems with those who are in the hostels. Those in the hostels, they all have similar names, and they borrow the same social security card. They have the same names, they have the same social security number, so they all contribute under the same number, so there are three or four for just one social security number. So we have to find the little bits for each person and that causes enormous problems. That one over there is a case in point! [Jacques points to a large bag of papers: see Fig. 3.1]. The whole thing is made up of small salaries – a whole career – and I have five different people!

Fig. 3.1
figure 1

One social security account, five different people

Full size image

That the papers in Fig. 3.1 are in a plastic bag is not incidental. Hostel residents place a premium on the portability of their affairs, since many have had to travel around France for work, while others have changed hostels during renovations or when rents increased (Dimier 2007). “A whole life is contained in a suitcase” (Germain, outreach officer, anti-poverty charity), and clearly there are limits to the amount of material one can place in a suitcase. There are also clear limits to the number of documents which can be stored in one’s room in the hostel, given its minimal size and insufficient storage facilities (see Chap. 1). As a result, various documents – considered less important than others – have been jettisoned along the way:

They have one or two suitcases which they have hauled around their whole life. Papers take up room, and they didn’t see the importance of them, so they have thrown them out. Often also they said that they would return home one day, so they haven’t seen the importance of such papers (Béatrice, health advisor, migrant welfare association).

However, deciding what can be kept and what can be discarded is not always easy when one does not read French well and when the jargon used by administrative bodies is opaque (Hamadache 2002). Yet discarding papers means the impossibility of contesting decisions about one’s basic pension entitlement, as well as one’s complementary pension, especially for those who were working in France prior to 1973. Before this date, it was not obligatory for employers to contribute to their employees’ complementary pension funds. If one has thrown away one’s payslips, it is very difficult to trace one’s rightful contributions to the latter scheme.

Finally, what is crucial to note is that these problems (mis-transcriptions, loss of important documents, ‘shared’ social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, untraceable former employers, and later entry into the workforce) only become apparent or important at retirement. They are rarely of significance prior to this time. These facets of the paperwork experience bring into focus the timetabling function of welfare state inclusion which I have mentioned at various points in this chapter. Once again, retirement is found to be a critical juncture in material terms, seen in the fact of lower pension incomes for hostel residents in many cases.

3.3 Suspect Mobility, Enforcement and Tactics of Evasion

In recent years, retired hostel residents who travel back-and-forth between France and their countries of origin have become targets of suspicion for French welfare agencies. Such agencies are increasingly concerned to crack down on what they perceive as fraudulent claims for social security benefits. One clear manifestation of this suspicion and targeting on the part of the authorities is the administrative practice of on-the-spot passport checks. This is a novel practice according to Abdou (outreach officer, migrant rights association):

The means of control is the passport, and the fact of demanding passports is new … It’s four years since I started [doing outreach] in the hostels, and the problem of the passports has been flagrant this year, last year it started to appear a little… These administrative bodies are monitoring more and more the phenomenon – the aller-retours (return trips) of the residents are much more scrutinised now.

The procedure of the passport check is very simple. The local Tax Office sends an identical letter to a large number of named individuals living in the hostel in question. The letter requests that the addressee comes to the local office within a certain time period with their passport or a photocopy of their passport. At the office, a member of staff scrutinises the entry and exit stamps in the passport for the past year to verify whether the person concerned has spent 6 months on French territory or not. If it is less than 6 months, the person concerned risks having his social security suspended and his health insurance card invalidated. Likewise, domicile for the tax declaration is recorded as being outside France. The tax declaration and fiscal domicile are important in that they record one’s income for the previous year, crucial when it comes to proving eligibility for benefits which are means-tested.

Legally, the checking of passports is regarded as a dubious practice (Hamadache 2005). As one politician who campaigns on behalf of ageing migrants put it, “Since when have the French authorities been allowed to use foreign documents as a means of verification?” Similarly, Ali El Baz, formerly national coordinator of the Association of North African Workers in France (ATMF),Footnote 15 has written that “the passport has become a weapon in the hands of administrators to assign those concerned to a state of house arrest” (El Baz 2007: 106). Many of the residents themselves are aware of the dubious legality of the passport checks. At a focus group which I facilitated at the Senior Citizens’ club run by a local branch of ATMF, there was quite a lively debate among the participants about the checks which administrative bodies conduct with the passport: one Algerian man felt that it was quite right that there were controls, “because you have to respect the laws of the country where you live”, but most in the group felt that it was a blatant discrimination. This was echoed by several respondents who argued that the practice amounted to “racial discrimination” and was “completely abnormal.” As one of my West African respondents, Issa (70, Tambacounda, Senegal) pointed out indignantly: “if you’re a French pensioner, no one asks you for your passport!”

Yet some French pensioners may just as easily transgress these minimum residence requirements for welfare allocations, notably those sun-seeking pensioners who spend some or most of their time in warmer Mediterranean climes (see also Gehring 2015). Yet in France it is only ever immigrant elders, and particularly those living in hostels, who are targeted with the passport checks. Sandrine, who works at a charity providing legal advice to retired and disabled workers, commented acerbically:

What’s funny is that the passport is only ever demanded from people of foreign nationality. We’ve never had a French person come to us saying “I went on holiday for three months, I used to get the minimum vieillesse and now they’ve cut my benefit.” We’ve never had a single case of that although our services are open to both French and foreigners. (…) It’s just foreigners who are checked, so there is all the same a certain suspicion, a certain distrust, vis-à-vis foreigners who ‘break the bank’, and there is an aspect … always this aspect of fraud (Sandrine, legal advisor, citizen rights charity).

Despite the controversy attached to the passport checks, the representatives of various welfare agencies to whom I spoke are quite determined to maintain a tough stance on this issue, as the extract from an interview I had with a CNAV branch manager shows (Box 3.1).

Box 3.1: Excerpt from Interview with Jacques (Branch Manager, CNAV) 20 July 2009

  • Jacques: I do many investigations, because they don’t live here. They get themselves domiciled at a hostel, or at a friend’s place.

  • AH: And how do you do these investigations?

  • Jacques: Well I make a request to our legal department. I send an investigation request along with the aim of the request, and I ask that they check if the person concerned is indeed resident in France as they say they are. So this investigator is going to visit that person, is going to arrange a meeting with the person, and in the meantime the investigator goes to the tax office to see if there is a tax declaration which has been made. He also goes to the health insurance fund to see if there have been any healthcare reimbursements, so he checks a certain number of things (…) And when the person concerned is in a meeting with the investigator, if he comes with his passport of course, we look at the dates of entry and exit. So it’s a fairly rigorous check all the same! And I make lots of rejections. Because they aren’t there! (…) It’s 2 years now that we have been very sensitised to fraud, and all the agencies, be it the Family Benefits Fund, the Disability Agency, the National Old Age Insurance Fund, we are all aware of fraud, and so we are very, very, very vigilant! (…) They are cunning but we are cunning too. They don’t know all the tricks.

  • AH: And so, this fraud awareness, it’s quite recent?

  • Jacques: Let’s just say that we have always done this, we have always been sensitised to this, but it is at the level of the other agencies which were less sensitised than us.

Tactics of Territoriality: Official and Unofficial Ruses to Avoid Timetabling

Administrators at the various benefits agencies seek to territorially fix and temporally timetable the older hostel population through means such as passport checks, tax declarations, and other official procedures as discussed by Jacques in Box 3.1. In response, hostel residents, and, to a certain extent, hostel managers, exert their own agency in responding with various practices which subvert the intentions of the authorities and which are difficult to control. The contrast between the authorities’ procedures and hostel residents’ agency can be productively conceptualised by applying Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics. In de Certeau’s vocabulary, the former implies the formal, the fixed, the bounded, the proper, the mapped, whereas the latter designates that which is illicit, informal, mobile (de Certeau 1984). This distinction is above all about power, as Tim Cresswell relates in On the Move: mobility in the modern world:

the weapons of the strong are strategies – classification, mapping, delineation, division (…) The weak on the other hand, are left with furtive movement to contest the territorialization of urban space (…) The tactic is consigned to using the space of the powerful in cunning ways (…) the tactic is the ruse of the weak – the mobile drifting through the rationalized spaces of power (Cresswell 2006: 47–48).

The tactics deployed by residents in the hostels will be described in the present section. They include the ‘shared rooms’ system instituted by several hostel companies, sub-letting of rooms, and what I will call ‘letterbox solidarity’.Footnote 16 The origins of the shared rooms system lie in the fact that hostel companies, like their ageing clienteles, also experience timetabling pressures from the social security agencies. The Family Benefits Fund (Caisse d’allocations familiales, hereafter CAF), which supervises payments of the APL housing benefit, requires hostel managers to report any absence of over 4 months (the minimum period of residence to be eligible for the APL being 8 months). Yet this is very difficult for managers, as residents do not always indicate they are leaving, and managers are not always present to witness such comings-and-goings. If the CAF finds that the residence conditions have not been observed, APL is suspended and processes are set in motion to recuperate the sum received in error. In practice, it is the hostel companies which are required to pay back the overpaid sums, as APL is paid directly to the accommodation provider, not the tenant. This implies a major financial loss for hostel companies. According to one Sonacotra-Adoma employee, the CAF is entitled to demand up to 2 years of arrears (which can easily be €2000).

Anxious to reduce the recuperations demanded by the CAF for housing benefit paid in error, several hostel companies (notably Sonacotra-Adoma) have instituted an innovative system known as the ‘shared rooms’ system. Put simply, a room is reserved for the use of two to four named individuals, who each occupy it in turn for a set period. They are no longer entitled to the APL (which requires at least 8 months’ residence in France), but the rent they pay is proportional to the duration of residence in the hostel. The system, in other words, enables residents to keep a room in a hostel without the constraint of paying for it all year round. Many people I spoke to had positive things to say about this initiative. Denis, a hostel manager, commented:

They get a letterbox, and they can continue to receive all their mail, their address is here. And so, they stay a certain amount of time in France but on the other hand they no longer get [housing] benefits. But anyway, it at least allows them to have proof of address, to have an address if there is a problem, or anything, then they can come back.

The great advantage in having a postal address in one’s name is that when away from France, one can ask a friend or relative to regularly check one’s letterbox for mail, and if a letter looks official, get them to open it. “It’s not so difficult, the paperwork, it’s not too difficult, if there is someone who can let you know, then you reply straightaway, no problem.” (Issa, 70, Tambacounda, Senegal) According to Dr. Ismail, an Algerian doctor who volunteers as a medical advisor in several Parisian hostels, “This solidarity [among the residents] continues, even if it is diminished in other domains.” I myself was asked during my time living in a hostel to look out for any mail which might end up in my letterbox addressed to the man who used to have my room: this individual was back in North Africa at the time. Family too can play a role here: residents can give their letterbox key to a relative – a nephew for example – who lives nearby. I also saw this in several hostels where I undertook participant observation: youngsters and other obvious ‘outsiders’ would come to the hostel and open absent residents’ letterboxes. Thanks to ‘letterbox solidarity’, residents can be forewarned to return to France, in order to satisfy the requisite administrative task. This tactic has frequently frustrated benefit agencies in the past when they have attempted to do residence checks (Hamadache 2005).

Implementing the shared rooms scheme has not been without difficulty (Unafo 2002). The scheme requires that participating residents give 2–3 weeks’ notice before they return to France. Hostel managers need at least two – if not more – rooms vacant and available at any one time, because people often come back to the hostel before they said they would, or the current incumbent falls ill and cannot give up his room as planned. Hostel manager Denis noted: “Sometimes there are snags, yes. All it takes is for one of them to be to here and then fall ill and the other arrives and then they find themselves together” (i.e., in the same room). According to Béatrice, a health advisor for a migrant welfare association, “They decide to leave when the plane ticket isn’t so expensive, when there is a religious holiday, or a marriage or when there is someone at home who is ill. So they don’t plan it in advance.” Furthermore, the shared rooms scheme is not suitable for everyone. Some residents are used to their own rooms and get on well with their neighbours. Béatrice pursued this theme by stressing the importance of feeling at home in one’s room and not wishing to give it up:

The room in the hostel is their house here in France, and old people, they have to have their bearings. And if we put them in a room which is not the one in which they have lived, where they have their things, it’s a bit like … not going back to one’s house but rather like going back to a hotel. It’s psychologically very difficult for these people. There are some places where it works (…) There are some hostels, I’ve been there, where it’s four people who are from the same village, or from the same family. That is to say that it doesn’t bother them, it doesn’t trouble them to come there after a cousin has been before, or the neighbour who comes from the same village. When it is people you don’t know, or people with whom you don’t have a family or village tie, it’s more difficult, it’s like a hotel and that is difficult when you are old.

Giving up one’s room is especially difficult if one is a long-term resident: I met several people who had been in the same room for 30 years or more. Of course, one can pay for one’s room all year round, but this implies paying for something which one does not use and amounts to fraud if one is in receipt of housing benefit. One solution to this waste of resources is to sub-let the room, although this tactic is not permitted by the hostel management companies. Nonetheless, it occurs, at least to a marginal extent, in most hostels (Sonacotra 2006). In fact, sub-letting was at the heart of a bitter episode in the hostel where I stayed: an anonymous letter alleging that some residents were profiting from sub-letting and claiming benefits illegally when in actual fact they were resident in North Africa most of the year was circulated at the end of 2008. Copies of this malicious letter were sent to the police, the local tax office, and the CAF. Its effect was to make many residents very anxious about the prospect of an imminent passport check by the authorities.

3.4 Conclusion

This chapter has presented concrete examples of the timetabling effect which welfare state agencies have on hostel residents’ lives, influencing back-and-forth mobility at retirement. Through these mechanisms, it was shown that the state not only facilitates or impedes physical mobility across state borders, it may also enforce mobility, particularly upon the most precarious in society. Three contexts of timetabling were identified: the old-age pension regime, the condition of ‘regular and effective residence’ for non-contributory social security benefits, and the annual tax declaration. While the temporal and territorial ‘rules of access’ which pertain to these contexts are applicable to all citizens, migrants and non-migrants alike, it was argued in Sect. 3.2 that certain ‘non-standard’ elements of migrant workers’ biographies lead to systemic disadvantage vis-à-vis non-migrant populations. Indeed, contrary to the narrative of ‘welfare scroungers’ which those hostile to immigrants invoke, research has shown that the net contributory effect of ageing migrants on social security systems is often positive. As Aguila and Vega (2017) show, older migrants (especially those who return or circulate back-and-forth) often pay into social security schemes without claiming all the benefits to which they are entitled.

The ‘non-standard’ biographies of the hostel residents are primarily manifested in administrative documentation, including mis-transcribed names, discarded proofs of entitlement, sharing of social security numbers, inaccurate or conflicting dates of birth, untraceable former employers, and later entry into the workforce. Critically these biographical features only become significant at retirement, lending credence to the idea that retirement is a critical juncture in hostel residents’ lives. Retirement is a juncture secondly insofar as it heralds an end to the sedentary constraint of participation in the labour market, enabling residents to spend more time with their families back home. Yet this mobility at retirement is dubious in the eyes of French administrators, who suspect the residents of not observing the minimum durations of residence required to be eligible for social assistance (see also Mbodj-Pouye 2016). This, together with their suspect proofs of identity and unreliable personal documents, leads to renewed attention on hostel residents’ administrative situation in France. The authorities seek to enforce timetabling and control residents’ comings-and-goings. In response, residents devise tactics to counteract and resist such bureaucratic control of their movements.

With regard to the book’s central research question, namely what explains the hostel residents’ preference for back-and-forth trips over definitive return, the empirical phenomena presented in this chapter appear to be best accounted for by Niklas Luhmann’s social systems approach. In Luhmann’s conception of society, the rationale of the national welfare state is to act as the “central moderator of relations of inclusion by producing occasions and dispositions for inclusion and by processing and ordering the consequences of exclusion” (Amiraux 2000: 246). Welfare states do this by striving to institutionalise the individual lifecourse – particularly during the formative years – in order to produce individuals with biographies which are relevant and expectable for organisations in society (especially employers in the economy). Immigrants, however, tend to diverge from the standard assumed lifecourse expected by organisations in society (Bommes 2000), in terms of administrative records, later entry to the labour market, educational qualifications, and so on. The repercussions of non-standard biographies among the older hostel residents have been presented at length above.

Additionally, Luhmann argues that the various social systems which constitute society (e.g., the systems of law, education, health, the economy, and so on) are increasingly unconcerned by demarcations of territory, with the sole but critical exception of the political system, the basic organisational unit of which is the national welfare state (Halfmann 2000). What this means in practice is that the inclusion (and exclusion) of individuals in the political system is territorially marked, through the comparatively modern institution of citizenship. In this schema, the cross-border mobility of migrants and mobile citizens has to be controlled:

From the point of view of the state, welfare policies are meant to impose a territorial criterion on the politics of inclusion in the political system and even of the moderation of inclusion in other function systems. This includes the attempts of the nation state to restrict the welfare state benefits to its citizens or to demand the consumption of the benefits on the state territory (Halfmann 2000: 41).

Thus the French authorities have actively sought to restrict consumption of welfare to French territory, leading to hostel residents’ ‘timetabled’ back-and-forth trips at retirement. This stark logic of the welfare state, which prevents some hostel residents from fulfilling the wish to spend their old age with family members in places of origin, has in the last decade been condemned by a growing coalition of activists, policy advisers and legislators, who view the state’s inflexible approach as a form of ‘house arrest’ which denies hostel residents’ rights to family life. In Chap. 8 I will conclude by outlining a recent piece of legislation aimed specifically at facilitating the return of hostel residents to their families, and which appears to contradict the territorial and temporal logics of the welfare state described above. Before then, however, Chap. 4 continues the argument presented here about timetabled lives, by documenting similar trends in relation to healthcare. Like administrative paperwork, healthcare also leads to timetabling, with trips being scheduled to coincide with various medical appointments. Similarly, hostel residents’ non-standard biographies result in certain systemic disadvantages in the domain of health.