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Every day in the Alps, five or ten or twenty people set out from the Italian village of Oulx in the hopes of reaching the French town of Briançon. They have traveled thousands of kilometers from Afghanistan or Iran or Guinea in the hopes of finding security in Europe. The governments of Europe seek to exclude them with border walls and pushbacks, yet they persevere with their journeys, and along the way some people in the places they pass through help them to continue. In the Alps, where the terrain is often dangerous and snow-covered, local residents go into the mountains to search for people lost and in need of assistance. Other help those who have crossed the border with a place to sleep, hot meals, clean laundry, and advice for the rest of their journeys. The people on the move are criminalized for their mobility, and the people who help them are criminalized for their solidarity. Yet they all carry on.
Why are people crossing the Alps in such dangerous conditions? Why do people have to resort to such risky journeys? Why are French citizens sentenced to fines and prison time for helping people who are lost in the snow? Why do people dedicate day in and day out to sheltering and feeding the people who cross the border? What are the political stakes of the various solidarity practices taking place between citizens and migrants? All these questions are significant because what is happening at the Franco-Italian border disrupts the status quo: migrants are claiming rights with their presence, and citizens are transgressing the boundaries the state imposes on them to act in solidarity with migrants.
My research concerns how citizens and noncitizens act together in solidarity and how the state criminalizes such actions, focusing on a case study of the Franco-Italian borderzone. Taking a performative approach to understanding the rights claims made by citizens and noncitizens, I propose understanding these actions as “acts of passage”, which participate in the contestation over who can act as a subject of rights. The different actions taken by citizens and noncitizens highlight the tensions between citizenship in law and citizenship in practice, and therefore I argue that practices of solidarity between citizens and migrants can be theorized as acts of citizenship because they make claims for rights and inclusion in a way that challenges exclusionary bordering practices. When citizens and migrants enact citizenship in solidarity, the boundary between citizen and noncitizen becomes blurred. In this context, people are challenging citizenship as a bounded legal category based on national identity in favour of an active form of citizenship as a practice of inclusion.
I have studied two sites on Franco-Italian border: the Roya Valley, where an independent collective began welcoming migrants in 2016, and Briançon, where people have mobilized to help approximately 16,000 migrants who have crossed from 2017-2022. A year of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed how actions ranging from assisting people in danger in the mountains to mundane tasks, like doing laundry and buying train tickets, take on political meanings. Such activities, when done for and with people without legal status, may be relegated to the margins of legality, but become political. I draw on this political ethnography to demonstrate how citizens and noncitizens together challenge the state’s practices of migrant exclusion to enact an expansive citizenship yet to come.