WANNA COME OVER FOR... A JOB?

What do you understand by "hospitality"? What bell makes it ring in your mind? 

When I think about it, I see someone, perhaps a small group of people looking happy to be visiting someone else. You might want to invite over some friends for an afternoon tea or for dinner. You might want to call them to show them the pictures of your holidays or your new cat or dog. And once they arrive, you try to make their time at your place as pleasing as possible, and to make them feel "at home".  

Reading Mireille Rosello's essay, "Postcolonial hospitality: the immigrant as guest" , I found out that when it comes to migration studies the word hospitality can describe a phenomenon other than what I had in mind:  It defines the relationship between a country and immigration to that country.  In this sense, concepts of hospitality, whose boundaries I thought I had clear in mind, become more complex. In other words, when hospitality becomes a "political position", which means state hospitality vis-a-vis individual hospitality,  the "discourse of right and discourse of generosity blur" (Rosello). The purpose of her paper is not so much to defend nor praise hospitality in this sense. Rather, while  analyzing and questioning the two faces of hospitality (the host and the guest) she tries to figure out the nature of hospitality and whether and how it should be redefined. 

Western countries tend to look at immigrants with both suspicion and aloofness. More often than not, an immigrant (the used-to-be-called sans-papiers-without documents- in France), is an unwelcome guest, is someone who came to our country because he needed something. Plus, he is the Other, that is, different, unpredictable, perhaps dangerous. For reasons burdened by an historical colonial legacy, there is an unwritten hierarchy within the geopolitical map of the world, which makes inhabitants of certain states feel superior to inhabitants of others: in the past because they "colonize" them, and in present times, because they happen to be richer, hence more powerful.  

Rosello takes the case of immigration in France, a state historically famous on the papers for its being "hospitable" to migrants. In the years after WWII, people from foreign French-speaking countries, like Algeria, were "invited over" in France (see "recruited") with the aim of gathering workforce who would build up areas on the French suburbs. It happened then that a flux of invited immigrants went to France, where they began working and living. On the one hand, France gave these people the chance of starting anew in a new country, with a job and accommodation, on the other the conditions under which these people were working were not desirable. If we look at both sides, we see that the concept of hospitality becomes nebulous: it implies that migrants-accepting countries authomatically put themselves in a more powerful position than the newcomers.  France did not simply open the gates and let foreigners walk in out of generosity; instead, the government was recruiting workforce. The big question then arises: should these immigrants feel grateful for the chance they were granted, or should they see France's hospitality as a mere fair "contract" , as in "I give to you, you give to me"? It could be argued that when a nation-state invites immigrants as workforce, this state is not really being "hospitable" : at the end of the day, who can really tell who needs who more ( we'll have a clearer idea about it after Barbara Harrel-Bond's lecture on Wednesday maybe) ? 

Besides, as Rosello explains, postwar migrants had to deal with illiteracy and "miserable" living conditions. This possibly made them even more aliens of what they were already. It must be said that the state tried to help the children of these immigrants in the 1980s, although without much success: they were still outcasts. Do you remember Doria in the novel "Kiffe kiffe tomorrow"? She and her mother live in a low-income suburb outside of Paris. After her father departs to Morocco in order to get re-married, the state sent a social counsellor who would go to their place and monitor their situation once per week. Also, Doria reports that, despite her unwillingness to give them any credit, some of her teachers looked and sounded friendly to her, they tried to be understanding and to help. 

However, despite the help granted by the state and despite she was obtaining an education, many other things made her stuck in the "alien bubble": just to mention few, her poverty, her clothes, the oil her mother Jasmine used to brush her hair with, which made them look greasy and "oriental". Perhaps, most of all, her unwillingness to adapt.

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As Avril Bell points out in her article Being at home in the nation, notions of host, guest, home, arrival, hospitality in the field of migration are complex: 

What is the nature of this arrival? 

Are these guests invited andawaited or do they arrive unannounced? 

What do they want? 

Do they freely choose to come or are they in search of asylum? 

What hospitality does the host offer? What are the limits to that hospitality? 

How long are guests welcome to stay? 

What are to be their rights and obligations in relation to

the nation-space/homeland? 

Further, as they come from elsewhere, they are

clearly foreign and have a different culture of hospitality. How is the etiquette of the host–guest relation to be negotiated across cultural difference?

We might want to think about them. Reading the three last lines, I could not help but wondering: in our everyday lives, what makes someone a foreigner (hence  a guest) and what makes us more inclined to be good hosts? Again I wonder how much a passport can tell about one's identity in the first place, and if it has a real impact on the relationships between "foreigners" and locals. 

What I asked myself is (I am going to say "France" as a host country just to be consistent with Rosello's paper, but it could be everywhere else in a migrant-receiving country):

1) How we, human beings/ locals / youngsters, unconsciously define what is "foreigner"? I said unconsciously meaning that we do not virtually stick a stamp on their foreheads with a big F on it, but we might treat them and behave around them as they were carrying it. 

2) Do we treat the (a) second generation foreigner as a guest or as a French?

3) Do we treat the (b)adopted non-French kid raised by a French family as a guest or as a French?

I find it hard to answer to my questions. According to law, (a) and (b) are both French. However, we unconsciously catalogue as "foreign" everything that does not resemble our standard majority. It is non-foreign whatever we can recognize, people whose accent we cannot hear, who eat the food we eat, whose smell we cannot perceive because they smells like us. It is non-foreign anything which reactions and behaviours we can predict. In a nutshell, one-of-the-like is one who shares our cultures and values, and foreigner is one who does not.

With this in mind, reading my questions again, I would say that us people would feel comfortable treating like a local someone who was adopted by a local family - someone who, despite being born as a foreigner, spent enough of his/her developmental years (maybe most) in the host country. S/he speak the same language as us and her behavior is probably very predictable, because belongs to the range of behavior we are accustomed to and expect from one-of-the-like.  

From the same token, we would find a little harder to consider the second generation foreigner as a local. I realize this sounds simplistic and superficial. What I think, is that many are the factors which affect this individual's perception of him/herself and, consequentely, the others' perception of him/her. Admitting that it is not enough for someone to state one's identity for others to accept him/her as such, it is also true that in part your perception of yourself (hence your behavior), can affect the way people see you. Briefly: if, when in Rome, you do as the Romans do, easily you fill find people ready to welcome your and to make you one of them.

And, I have yet another example: I met once an Italian, born in Italy to an Austrian mother and Italian father, and who moved to Austria when he was very little. He could not really speak Italian. He was totally foreign to me. 

P.s From "La Haine": 
"Think about a young agent who beings his job full of good will: he doesn't last a month"
"Better than an Arab in a police station: he doesn't last one hour" (referred to Abdel) 
LOL