Carried out in Paris, Lampedusa and Lesvos, an ethnographic investigation goes behind the scenes of the administrative confinement of foreigners in an irregular situation.
Administrative detention centers are regularly considered in the light of an opposition between a State capable of controlling and detaining and illegal aliens detained while awaiting their expulsion. However, faced with the proliferation of confinement spaces in France and Europe, and while their management mobilizes an ever-increasing number of actors, one question often remains marginal: Who makes these places of confinement operate on a daily basis ? This is the question that Louise Tassin intends to answer. Contrary to a literature mainly focused on state institutions or on associative actors, the author invites us to shift our gaze to enter the workings of the detention system through actors on the margins of migration control: the staff ensuring the daily management of detention centers. Based on an ethnographic survey carried out in France, Italy and Greece, it explores the different forms of delegation on which the administrative confinement of foreigners in an irregular situation is based today.
Rather than considering administrative detention centers as exceptional spaces, marked by a suspension of law, the investigation reveals in particular a normalization of confinement based on routine practices, ordinary procedures and a sometimes ambiguous distribution of tasks. Far from noting a withdrawal of the State, the sociologist analyzes the transformation of its modes of intervention, based on the delegation of numerous tasks to private or associative actors. Based on daily practices, trajectories, room for maneuver, but also “ ambivalences » of those who work in these institutions, it makes an original contribution both to studies on administrative confinement and to contemporary analyzes of public action.
The opacity of confinement
Carried out in Paris, Lampedusa and Lesvos, Louise Tassin’s ethnographic investigation takes the reader behind the scenes of administrative confinement while placing local control practices in a broader European perspective. If the first four chapters are devoted to two administrative detention centers (CRA) in the Paris region, the surveys carried out in Italy (chap. 5) and in Greece (chap. 6) make it possible to understand confinement as a system crossed by various forms of delegation to private companies, associations or even committed residents. This “ perspective » (p. 21) of the Ile-de-France case with administrative detention on the islands of Lampedusa and Lesbos therefore does not aim to attest to a homogeneous model of confinement, but to highlight the common logics which structure the control of migration through different configurations.
One of the contributions of the book consists of showing that opacity is one of the constitutive mechanisms of these places. If the privileged access obtained by the author in the CRA Parisians allows him to observe the daily life of confinement, the obstacles encountered in Lampedusa and Lesvos reveal implicitly the mechanisms by which these spaces remain difficult to access for researchers or journalists. This opacity is based first of all on a material distancing from places of confinement. In Molnay as in Lampedusa, despite the quasi-carceral materiality of the two centers, the geographical distance contributes to their invisibility in public space. The case of Lesvos extends this reflection. Before the creation of a dedicated center, confinement was deployed in a plurality of locations scattered around the port and police stations. This spatial fragmentation made confinement materially less visible while extending forms of confinement well beyond the only spaces officially identified as places of detention.
Opacity is also constructed through the use of institutional vocabulary which tends to mask the deprivation of liberty. In Lampedusa, the centers become “ temporary permanent centers ”, then “ hotspots », while confinement is presented as a logistical operation for managing foreigners. This invisibility produces a double effect: it contributes to trivializing confinement while nourishing stereotypical representations of migrations and borders, like Lampedusa, often presented as “ the prison island “.
Ordinary border workers
The work also renews the understanding of detention centers as work spaces where the practices and professional identities of a plurality of actors intersect. From the 1990s, migration policies have been characterized by a process of delegation of border control, notably to airlines, but also by the daily management of the detention of people in an irregular situation, thus fueling a market in administrative detention. The attention paid to the economic issues of detention highlights the managerial dimension of the confinement system, with its logic of efficiency, control and cost reduction.
In France, daily tasks, such as welcoming detained people, maintaining premises, distributing meals or cleaning linen, are subcontracted to private service providers. In Lampedusa, the management of the center is privatized, with the exception of identification and police surveillance. Daily work is then delegated to social cooperatives. In Lesvos, another dimension of outsourcing can be seen, because the assistance practices of volunteers continue and partially replace the responsibility of the State. The issues of delegation to non-state structures thus appear in all their complexity, echoing the concept of borderwork (Or “ frontier production work ), developed by Chris Rumford to designate the way in which actors, often far from the decision-making centers, experience and shape the border. Indeed, these workers participate, in a differentiated way, in the daily production of administrative confinement through their interventions, their interpretations of the rules, their initiatives or their silences. Their central role is also manifested by the freedom of movement they have within the centers, which leads them to manage the movements of detainees and to become, in the words of one employee, “ the guarantors of the movement » (p. 37).
The investigation then traces the trajectories of these workers, often themselves in situations of social precariousness. Recruited in generally unfavorable conditions, sometimes from immigrant backgrounds or former undocumented immigrants, they share certain experiences with the people retained. This social and biographical proximity constitutes both a resource for the functioning of the centers and a potential cause of tensions with detainees or the police.
The survey thus makes it possible to restore “ ambivalence » of the position of these workers without reducing the analysis to a rigid opposition between domination and resistance. It places at the center of the reflection the tensions which run through the daily work of these private providers. The latter must in fact maintain a certain professional distance while responding to the requests of those detained, cooperate with the police while distancing themselves from them, respect procedures and, at the same time, find informal solutions to defuse the tensions that may arise. The delimitation of their mission is then vague and clashes with the urgency of the field, leading them to take on several roles: translators, mediators, guides, even “ smugglers of rights “. They thus develop practical expertise which leads them to carry out tasks going well beyond those provided for in their contract, without real material or symbolic recognition. This social proximity is carefully analyzed, giving rise to forms of identification, solidarity, but also distancing. In this regard, Louise Tassin’s analysis echoes the reflections of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, for whom the border does not only constitute an instrument of control, but above all a device for producing hierarchies of work giving rise to new modes of exploitation. It is in fact on a subordinate and precarious workforce that the confinement system relies.
Depoliticization of work in detention
The analysis of working practices and conditions is part of a broader perspective of studying developments in public action. Indeed, Louise Tassin implicitly questions the reconfigurations of the exercise of state power, by refocusing reflection on what is traditionally relegated to the margins. It shows how the delegation of migration control contributes to fragmenting the State’s responsibilities linked to the detention of foreigners. Thus, if the fight against irregular immigration ” appears today as a major political issue, it is paradoxically accompanied by a “ depoliticization of work in detention » (p. 262). This dynamic is based first of all on a fragmentation of work within these centers. The police intervene almost exclusively in the context of maintaining order or administrative tasks, while daily interactions are entrusted to private service providers or associative actors. This division of labor then produces a physical and symbolic distance between the police officers and the detained people, fueling a disengagement of the authorities and favoring a more abstract and homogenizing perception of the detained foreigners.
Another mechanism highlighted is based on the existence of a rhetoric specific to service or assistance. The vocabulary of reception, borrowed from the hotel industry, then contributes to the euphemization of the reality of confinement. This discursive register conveys a representation of retention which ends up being internalized by the workers themselves, who tend to define themselves as “ subordinate executives lacking decision-making power » (p. 262) rather than as actors of migration control.
Finally, the work offers a fascinating reflection on the way in which these workers contribute to the production and hierarchy of migratory categories, coming to “ invest in the moral and racial categorization processes that distinguish “good” and “bad” foreigners (…) » (p. 262). This question, which emerges throughout the investigation, in particular through the moral distinctions established between different groups of migrants, undoubtedly deserves to be further explored, because it offers fruitful perspectives on the ordinary processes of categorization specific to the border system. The attention paid to the workers who operate administrative detention centers opens the way to a reflection on the way in which migratory categories produced by the State are concretely mobilized, appropriated, even redefined, in the context of their daily work.
The questions raised by Louise Tassin’s work appear all the more relevant as national and European migration policies are today experiencing a new tightening. This is evidenced by the adoption by the European Parliament of the regulation “ back », on June 17, 2026. This should indeed make it possible to strengthen the outsourcing of migration control, in particular through the creation of detention centers outside the European Union, while systematizing the use of administrative detention.