Displacing 30,000 Non-Nationals per year in France. A study of state logistics

PhD Defense of Maxime Christophe, within the Sociology program at Sciences Po, Friday, February 27th, 2026. 

Déplacer 30 000 personnes étrangères par an – enquête sur une logistique d’État
Displacing 30,000 Non-Nationals per year in France. A study of state logistics,
PhD thesis committee members: Marc Bernadot (Mesopolhis, AMU), Nicolas Fischer (CNRS, CESDIP), Glenda Garelli (University of Leeds), Federica Infantino (URMIS), Sukriti Issar (Sciences Po-CRIS), Ettore Recchi (Supervisor, Sciences Po-CRIS).

This thesis documents the systematisation of displacement through assistance targeting one of the most precarised segments of foreigners in France: asylum seekers. It examines the central instrument underpinning this process, the Centres d’Accueil et d’Évaluation des Situations (C.A.E.S.), incorporated into the Dispositif National d’Accueil (D.N.A.) in 2018 to organise the sorting and centrifugal redistribution of this population from Paris to the rest of the country. 

The research draws on administrative archives, the ethnography of a Paris-region C.A.E.S. and the analysis of its register, observations at immigration desks and in regional C.A.E.S., as well as interviews with administrative staff, social workers and people who passed through these centres. C.A.E.S. belong to the genealogy of camps for foreigners while reshaping the experience of confinement. 

They contribute to the containment of a population rendered dependent on assistance through restrictions on social and employment rights. Their logistical optimisation function within the contemporary accommodation system encompasses the sorting of ‘migrants’ (as a residual category) and the dispersal of those entitled to reception services. Social workers experience tensions within their professional ethics and struggle to preserve a shrinking support mandate. 

The case of men at the margins of the reception system shows how, from within a C.A.E.S., they confront enforced (im)mobility. Studying this machinery ultimately reveals a policy aimed at containing the autonomous geographical aspirations of those dependent on public hospitality.