Méfiance et enquête de réalité. Ce que les étrangers en situation irrégulière savent de l’État

Abstract

Policies designed to limit unauthorized migration mean that undocumented migrants in France live with the daily threat of deportation. To avoid this eventuality, they have to continually call their environment and their social relations into question and so preempt any potential dangers. This raises the question of how far to take these inquiries into the nature of things. As regards the state, these inquiries reveal its ambiguities and ambivalences, since the (limited) protections afforded by residency are granted by the very same state that inspires migrants’ mistrust. Whilst these people go about their quest for “papers”, the state alternately appears as a rational bureaucracy, an institution embodied in the arbitrary will of its agents, and an entity endowed with magical powers.

Keywords

• inquiry
• State
• undocumented migrants
• threat