Waiting for Papers

“Waiting and wandering with undocumented migrants across Marseille, Jacobsen builds a sharp, sensitive ethnography showing how documents become bordering devices linked to specific temporalities. This brilliant work transforms our understanding of migration governance by focusing on its temporal dimension, revealing how it produces both precarious inclusion and incorrigible migrant resistance. An indispensable read for anyone seeking to understand migration beyond simple legal categories.”

-Melissa Blanchard, Senior Researcher at CNRS, Centre Norbert Elias, Marseille

“This brilliant ethnography is a landmark contribution to migration studies, anthropology, and citizenship debates. Grounded in meticulous, committed fieldwork and animated by respect and care for its interlocutors, the book challenges readers to rethink documentation not merely as a bureaucratic instrument, but as a lived, affective, and deeply political terrain—one that structures time, shapes subjectivities, and governs possibilities.”

-Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol, University of Bristol

Starting from the paradox that undocumented migrants – known as sans-papiers in French – often have pockets, backpacks, and drawers full of papers, this book explores the role of documentation in how migration is governed and experienced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a ten-year period in Marseille, it highlights the increasing securitization of migration, the production of migrant illegality, the expansion of detention and deportation practices, and the persistence of (post)colonial legacies. Contributing to the 'temporal turn' in migration studies, the book analyses the ‘temporal architectures’ – the laws, built environments, services, technologies and documentary practices – to which undocumented migrants in Marseille recalibrate their present lives and future orientations. ‘Waiting for papers’ conditions life across the domains of work, family and health. Despite the disciplinary XE "discipline"  effects of border policing XE "policing"  and immigration law enforcement, undocumented migrants continue their struggles, pursuing their aspirations and desires to ‘move well’ in life.

Christine M. Jacobsen is Professor of Social Anthropology, and former director of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research and the International Migration and Ethnic Relations research unit at the University of Bergen. Among her recent publications is the co-edited volume Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration.