Description
This paper considers whether there can be radical political potential in practices of everyday solidarity between migrants and citizens at the border. It takes as its focus the town of Briançon on the Franco-Italian border, where citizens have hosted nearly 12,000 migrants since 2017. Here, mundane tasks, like doing laundry, cooking meals, and buying train tickets, take on outsize meaning because these everyday activities, when done for people without legal status, are relegated to the margins of legality. There is a tension between the ongoing emergency of constant arrivals across a violent border, and the routine nature of the assistance that citizens have been providing to migrants for the past four years. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates how the new emergency presented new challenges and new forms of repression. Yet rather than destabilizing solidarity, responses were integrated into the routine practices already established. The paper considers these routine practices of emergency assistance as performances of everyday politics through which citizens challenge the state to include the noncitizen outsider.
