Feelings of Frustration, Immigration and the Context of Reception

Feelings of Frustration, Immigration and the Context of Reception

October 2nd, 2007

I have been in Paris for almost a week and I cannot find an apartment. Besides a large demand for small apartments, a big problem has been the lack of papers. While having a student visa, from the point of view of many renters, I am “undocumented”! It has become commonplace to ask for letters of “caution” from one’s parents, bank or someone in France as a kind of financial guarantee. I understand this but as foreign student, this is very hard to obtain.

The official letters from Columbia University and the Institute des Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po) demonstrating my fellowship are not enough. After adding up the amount of scholarship in dollars, many real state agents ask me how am I going to live like that in Paris for a year! They also ask for proofs from previous housing in Paris, or French pay stubs. Since I am just arriving from New York, I do not have either. The student housing available is long gone. Sciences Po is affiliated with some groups that help students find housing but not for people over 26. There are many postings at printed and internet services such as “de particulier à particulier” (pap.fr) or similar websites but apartments are gone hours after they are posted, and the renters take on an air of royalty, they know how coveted their rooms are and they act accordingly.

I have noticed that, unlike in the United States, in France, to do almost any kind of contract - for banking, housing, telephone contracts, etc. - they ask for a official ID, preferably issued by the French government, which, for non-citizens, many times their passport or visa turn out not to be acceptable, but instead the much preferable “La Cart de Sejour” is requested – a police issued document that attests to temporal legal status in France (Patrick Weil has documented precedents of this document in French history around the definition of who is and is not French).

This contemporary document control asserted while negotiating with private institutions serves as a de facto migration control (see Weil, 2006). Besides this, keep in mind the fact that the police can stop anyone and ask for documents at any given time with no previous excuse, this kind of control, done by private parties, must also affect the access that immigrants have to housing, banks, cell phones, etc. Not that it becomes impossible to access these services but it is a strong barrier, as according to a couple of informants, that results in many immigrants living in cramped quarters with more than five people in a small room, many times lacking water or adequate sanitary conditions. And many new arrivals get prepaid phone cards which are convenient but also have much higher per minute rates instead of formal telephone contracts, which have monthly fixed rates.

Since I have not yet found housing, I am staying with friends of friends. Three young French guys are being my hosts. I like them very much, and we are becoming good friends. They are extremely intelligent, generous, and trusting. They are very nice and are rarely in the apartment all at the same time, yet after one week I am starting to feel bad for inconveniencing them.

Lacking a house and facing a lot of administrative and bureaucratic hurdles in France, I do not feel welcome. I feel like I do not have a place of my own (except of when I am in the libraries and/or when I am in cyberspace). When I feel I may be inconveniencing my hosts, I just go to public areas. During the day I can go to the university and to the public libraries but at night it is a little hard to find a place to work with one’s laptop and access the internet without having to pay a lot or without being harassed by the waiters. After a while, this feeling of nomadism takes an emotional toll on you and increases the levels of stress and awareness (something which by the way has pushed me to be very productive). But I can only imagine how it must be for newly arrived immigrants who are made to feel unwelcome. The emotional toll and the feeling of transgression are like a shadow that follows you everywhere and makes you be extra-self conscious and uneasy.

After thinking about this, I talked for three hours in a café with a berber from Tunisia in what turned out to be my second interview. In part of the conversation he told me how he does NOT feel “Chez lui” - at home- in France and how his home is in Tunis, where he is going back to retire and die when he is old. He told me that in spite of speaking French, working as a boulanger, and having lived in France for more than seven years he is constantly reminded in many ways that he is not welcome. Furthermore, he told me he lives with his sister since he has not been able to find housing in Paris in the last months (more on this later, for the moment, I will keep the rest of the details of this interview private to safeguard the anonymity of my informant).

According to psychoanalytic developmental theory, people go through important individuation events in childhood and adolescence where the person, formerly indistinguishably connected to others, starts building mental borders around his/her body and mind, and becomes individualized, gaining consciousness of his/her person as independent and separate from the primary caretaker, and the family. Akhtar (1985) poses that migration is like a “third individuation”, where the individual is forced to create a further distinction between him and the larger society, in terms of leaving one’s society physically behind, and of always being somewhat on the outside in the new society, because of one’s condition of being a stranger and an alien. This is another example of the feeling of alienation that classic sociological theory talks about [more on this third individuation and psychoanalytic approaches to migration and their relation to sociological theory in a future blog].

What is interesting is the strong psychological challenge that immigration, without guaranteed housing and avenues of reception, presents to the immigrants (see Portes, A., and Rumbaut, R. for the comparison between the context of reception in the U.S. for Cubans and Mexicans and their long term implications). An unwelcoming “context of reception” for immigrants prevents the fast and seamless assimilation that the French state and society expect and demand in their Republican and integrationist ideal (much more on this later).

Akhtar, S. 1995. A Third Individuation: Immigration, Identity and the Psychoanalytic Process. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. 43:1051-1084

Portes, A., and Rumbaut, R. 2006. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Weil, Patrick. 2005. La République et sa diversité. Immigration, intégration, discrimination. Paris, Seuil, "La République des Idées".

Weil, Patrick. 2005b. Qu’est-ce qu’un français ? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution. Paris, Gallimard, "Folio Histoire" (Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, 651 p.).

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