Impacts of political and social contexts on refugees’ experiences: A comparison between Southeast Asian refugees arriving in France in the 70s and recent refugee migration

ABSTRACT

The influx of refugees into France since 2015 has been framed as a crisis and marked by a restrictive turn in arrival and asylum policies. By comparison, in the 1970s Southeast Asian refugees fleeing from communist regimes were welcomed warmly in the country. This article compares two in-depth case studies of refugees, analysed using the biographical policy evaluation method, to retrace how the policies and collective representations of these two different historical moments affect the experiences of refugees over time. It shows that policies play a significant role in shaping refugees’ experiences in respect of their access to papers, housing, language courses and work, thus impacting, but not determining, their possibilities of reconstructing life in exile. The comparison also raises the question of how personal experiences of arrival, viewed as a rejection or a welcome, influence refugees’ life courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical comparison
• collective representations
• biographical policy evaluation
• refugees’ perspective
• arrival and integration policy
• France

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 From an institutional perspective, the term ‘refugee’ is defined under international law by the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. Determining who belongs to this category is therefore also always a political question.

From a wider sociological and anthropological perspective, we use the term of refugee more broadly, to the empirical reality of people seeking refuge (Weiß, 2018).

2 The names of our interviewees have been anonymised.

3 We refer to “collective representations” as dominant imaginations circulating in the public sphere, relying on a distinction concerning categories of migration made by Crawley & Skleparis, 2018. In reference to Hear 2012, they singled out policy categories, vernacular categories and social science categories. Our analysis takes into account both policy categories (in the form of policy measures) and vernacular categories (in the form of collective representations).

4 The example of the Jewish refugees of the 1930s and 40s has been used as a point of comparison for the humanitarian crisis of 2015 since it began (Ahonen, 2018; Stone, 2018).

5 Both of us have an important experience of conducting empirical research in France. Putting together observations from our field work made us discover how differently the reception of refugees was organised in France at different historical moments which motivated us to go further in the historical comparison within the French case.

6 During the same period, France received about 8000 Syrian resettlement refugees between 2014 and 2018 (UNHCR, 2019).

7 France Terre d’Asile (FTDA) is an association that still supports asylum seekers to this day.

8 This exception should not lead to the conclusion that their asylum applications were unfounded. For a description of their reasons for seeking asylum, see Condominas and Pottier (1984).

9 For more detail on these measures, see Meslin (2017).