Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration ...

IMMIGRATION POLICIES IN FRANCE 375
it was more profoundly a sign of structural changes occurring in international
migration. At the global level, the rapid transformation of a “new world order”
determined an exacerbation of nationalisms and transnational processes resulting,
on the one hand, in a series of regional conflicts and, on the other hand, in the
development of clandestine immigration networks. Both phenomena led to an acceleration
in the movements of human beings (Kearney 1995). In the local logic,
with increasingly restrictive immigration laws, asylum became one of the only
remaining “avenues of access” to legal status, thus facilitating a lack of distinction
between political and economic motives (Watters 2001). Confronted by an increase
in claims, the most common political reaction was to denounce the “crisis in asylum.”
The socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard made his famous statement,
“France cannot welcome all the misery of the world.” This rhetoric reinforced the
confusion between economic immigrants and political refugees, thereby discrediting
the latter. Asylum seekers became suspect. Soon the dramatization of this
discourse legitimized the use of more severe criteria for recognition of legal status
and an increasing restriction of social rights.
As Aristide Zolberg (2001) has suggested: “Indeed the prevailing sense of
an ‘international migration crisis’ has profoundly inflected the consideration of
policy alternatives. In particular, it has been invoked to justify draconian measures
to protect national borders, even at the expense of obligations towards refugees.”
The story of the East Sea illustrates how asylum has become a concern of ordinary
policing, interrupted only by specific political emergencies that arouse temporary
public sympathy toward victims. The dramas of Bosnia and Kosovo are examples
of these fitful displays of generosity when the political elite tries to follow or
even anticipate public opinion (Rosenberg 1995). However, the victims of violence
very soon become mere illegal immigrants again, and they are hunted down as the
Bosnians and Kosovares have been on the shores of Italy. Episodes of compassion
toward refugees thus appear as privileged moments of collective redemption
eluding the common law of their repression.
However, to make this repression socially acceptable, one has to disqualify
asylum seekers. Here, the performative power of words is particularly effective
in attaining this objective (Fassin 1996). The claimants are commonly designated
as clandestins, thus justifying official actions against them, such as sending them
to detention centers or driving them back to their countries. Even the services in
charge of the reception of asylum seekers seem to have internalized this negative
representation. A social worker in one of my studies explained, for example, that
although such claimants had the official provisional status of asylum seekers, she
considered them to be sans-papiers (i.e., undocumented) because she knew that
most of them would end up as such. Her anticipation of the eventual outcome, which
was statistically correct in more than eight cases out of ten, led her to deprive them
of universal social security benefits, for which she substituted less beneficial and
clearly stigmatized charitable medical aid. In this process of disqualification of
refugees, successive French governments developed three strategies.