In the absence of alternatives, many spend years in asylum re-examination procedures or try to get regularised through other mechanisms. Despite their efforts, most of them stay without official residency for several years, as Fabrice's case illustrates all too well. Moreover, the island’s location as well as the inaccessibility to travel documents make onward migration virtually impossible. Whilst France conducts regular expulsions to the Comoros and Madagascar, rejected asylum seekers from other countries of origin are trapped in irregularity on an island of only 376 km2.

 

Without regularised status, the concerned face numerous social borders, which remain invisible but have very tangible and violent impacts on their lives. The asylum rejection, the administrative battles for regularisation, the constant risk of police arrest and detention, the inaccessibility to formal employment or public services, the insecurities of the informal labour market, and so on, produce a continuum of institutional violence and are the manifestation of repeated practices of exclusion.

 

The growing scepticism towards, and the rejection of, asylum seekers is not specific to Mayotte or France, it is part of a broader political trend in Europe and elsewhere (Bohmer and Shuman 2018, 5). Access to international and legal mobility has become a privilege reserved to a small part of the world’s population and today’s European asylum regime is the living proof thereof. De Genova (2016, 351-52) concludes: ‘[T]he European asylum system is precisely not a system for granting asylum to refugees’, rather it is ‘a regime for the production of migrant ‘illegality’’.

 

Despite the unfavourable conditions, my interviewees developed a range of strategies of resilience and resistance. Personal resources such as faith, play a vital role, just as the ability to establish and maintain a social network. Some of the women I spoke to in the context of my research assure their economic survival by living with a “sponsor”, mostly elder white men. Whilst social relations are a powerful resource for securing livelihoods, they can produce social dependencies and be the source of exploitation and abuse. Others, like Natacha, a professional hairdresser from the DRC, turn their home into their workplace in order to minimise the risk of being arrested by the police. Although the French authorities do not deport people from Mayotte to continental Africa**, the border police (PAF - Police aux Frontières) still regularly arrest and detain rejected asylum seekers, only to release them a few days later, thereby maintaining the constant fear of expulsion and undermining their ability to establish stable living conditions. 

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Although my informants’ practices of resilience and resistance demonstrate their individual agency, the power relations between rejected asylum seekers and institutionalised forces, such as the French authorities, remain asymmetrical. As a French overseas territory and an EU Outermost Region, Mayotte has simultaneously become a gateway and a gatekeeper to Europe and pursues a policy of deterrence at the expense of individuals’ life prospects. Prevented from leaving the island and deprived from the access to basic rights, rejected asylum seekers in Mayotte have become the embodied evidence of the inequalities in access to global mobility. They are caught in an in-between space: They are neither inside nor outside the “Fortress Europe”. Or as Fabrice puts it: ‘Here, you cannot die and you cannot live.’ 

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*For the protection of my informants all names are fictitious.

 

**This article is based on research conducted between July 2019 and April 2020. Up to July 2020, the French authorities on Mayotte did not execute expulsions to destinations other than the Comoros and Madagascar. Due to the pressure of the Mahorian population, the French government did however announce a tighter immigration regime in August 2019, including the expansion of deportation schemes (Operation Shikandra). According to a former informant I spoke to over the phone in January 2023, the French border police recently stopped a boat and deported all passengers, including East Africans and a Syrian refugee, to Madagascar. A shift in practice by the French border police is thus to be observed.