«Come farsi un corpo […]». Analisi dei processi di produzione dei corpi migranti

The Paris-Nord Humanitarian Centre was inaugurated by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo in November 2016 with the aim of addressing the emergency of asylum seekers stuck in the streets of the French capital. The facility was functioning until March 2018, with approximately 66,000 people passing through its premises in almost two years of operation. In its first conception, the structure should have been limited to providing initial material assistance to people waiting for the rendez-vous for one of the registries for the application for asylum. However, few months after its opening, the system progressively shifted towards the function of selecting migrant subjectivities, considered legitimate within the practices of government articulated by the French institutions. In particular, the concept of vulnerability has come to be seen as discriminatory within the process of recognition of individuals in need of care, freeing them from the precariousness of the street life. In particular, vulnerability has ended up imposing itself as a discriminatory factor within the processes of recognition of individuals in need of assistance. As a consequence, this constituted the single biopolitical index capable of ensuring any form of visibility. Beyond the alleged naturalisation of vulnerability, this paper will outline the mechanisms that produce vulnerability as a condition characterizing the body of migrants, starting from the analysis of the codification of the latter through biometric technologies, employed in the contemporary regime of mobility. For these reasons, ethnographic reports on the experience of some asylum seekers in the Parisian context shall be used to trace the effects of subjectification and de-subjectification caused by the relation with devices of power, such as the Paris-Nord Humanitarian Centre.