Over a peak-hour commute in the Parisian metro last year, a middle-aged black woman elbowed her way to the leaning bar and loudly declared that she had just received an “OQTF”—an obligation to quit the French territory—from the French state. She repeated herself into the void that was the thick metro crowd, hoping for some recognition of her pain at the self-deportation order. Like everyone around me, I tried to avoid looking her in the eye, certain of my own comfort as a highly educated migrant. In her colorful wax dress that stood out amid the grey and the black, I imagined her cleaning homes or looking after the children of some rich French family. And with this job that she would soon lose, I imagined her feeding her family between Paris and elsewhere in Africa.
After this metro encounter, I began to hear many stories about those receiving the dreaded OQTF. The most touching story was that of Rayen Fakhfakh, a 21-year-old Tunisian studying medicine. In the photos I saw of him in the media, he always had a sincere-student composure that reminded me of my own students and of my younger self. “This could have been me,” I kept thinking!
As the end of 2025 approached, so did the end of my residence permit in France. I began to send anxious emails to the French administration for a renewal appointment, consistently receiving automated responses from what felt like a chatbot. Often, I sat morning and night, refreshing the administration’s webpage for appointment slots, hoping for some trick to avoid yet another chatbot. But the note on the webpage read that the appointment list was last updated more than a month before. And their telephone numbers continued to take me to an automated message, redirecting me again to the website with the chatbot.
In the midst of this void filled with chatbots and automated messages, my residence permit expired. And I became “illegal.”
On the day that my permit expired, I headed off early to my district’s administrative office—the same one made famous for giving Rayen his OQTF. Despite the cold and the rain, a large group had gathered in front of what looked like a checkpoint that fenced off the administrative building. We all took turns talking with one of the four security men, telling them that our permits were expiring or had expired, that there was no way to get an appointment on the website, that we risked losing our jobs, our rented homes, and our health insurance. We pleaded with them to let us enter the building, so that we could find a human to see the human in us. We pleaded with them that none of us wanted to be illegal, and that we had all been made illegal by the Kafkaesque administration that prided itself on having “gone digital.” Didn’t they have family dependent on precarious papers like ours?
Among ourselves—all brown and black—we shared the same stories of fear and confusion, of the possibility that the expiration of our permits might lead to an OQTF, followed by an uncertain judicial appeal process filled with lawyers and their exponential fees. We opened our phones and refreshed the same broken webpages, but the security guards, all brown and black like us, let no one enter the building without an official appointment. In the cold that was slowly eating through our bones, there was nothing we could do but accept defeat.
In the US, anti-migrant policies seem to come directly from the mouth of Donald Trump. While the French mock Trump’s vulgarity and his ICE raids—morally certain that such violence would never pervade the streets of their country—their government issues the highest number of OQTFs in Europe. Between July and September 2025, France issued 33,760 OQTFs, followed by Germany (12,510) and Greece (10,175). At the same time, in absolute terms, Germany hosts twice the number of non-EU citizens (12 million) compared to France (6 million). In France, a significant number of OQTF are issued to people originating from former French colonies; more than one-third are issued to migrants from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. So should these OQTFs be interpreted as an afterlife of colonization?
Extending Frantz Fanon’s theory of the North African syndrome, scholar Wael Garnaoui argues that the construction of the North African as pathological has shifted from the “sick” body as diagnosed by the colonial medical clinics to the “bad” intentions as diagnosed by the post-colonial administration governing migration. Today, “bad” intentions to overstay a visa justify a high number of Schengen visa rejections. And “criminal” intentions like radicalization and terrorism justify the growing number of residence permit rejections and OQTFs. In both the past and the present, the diagnosed person suffers, (wrongly) believing that the problem lies with them. When I became illegal, I searched for all the wrongs in my own actions: the administrative procedures that I should have followed, the life decisions that I should have never made. And like the Nord-Africain that Fanon writes about, I suffered from unexplainable pain in every part of my body. How would Fanon have explained my condition?
Once illegal, the threads holding migrant life quickly become undone. Despite living in France for more than two decades and submitting permit-renewal paperwork in accordance with the rules, Nadia, a single Ivorian mother living in the Greater Paris region, suddenly found herself made illegal by the French administration. She immediately lost her job, making it impossible for her to pay her rent and other bills, which slowly spiraled into unpayable debts. That is also the case of 22-year-old Malik, who sought refuge in France about 10 years ago after fleeing the civil war in Cameroon.
The increasing OQTF numbers are used by right-leaning media and politicians to prove the French state’s efficiency in the face of the so-called migration crisis. This discourse is accompanied by the hyper-mediatization of crimes committed by those with an OQTF, uniformly portraying all OQTF carriers as criminals. Yet those receiving OQTFs are often young students or single women with no criminal record. Anti-migrant circles regularly complain that the OQTFs are not fully executed; while 128,250 OQTFs were given out during 2024, only 14,685 (or 11.5 percent) OQTF-based departures were registered in France.
The so-called model minority migrants who receive OQTFs are constructed as an administrative error, while the structural nature of the French administrative system that produces illegality or legal liminality remains rarely challenged. Solidarity mobilized by these cases continues to be built along class lines, hiding the fact that, for the French administration, both Rayen and the black woman in the metro equally represent the “migration crisis” that needs to be fought and (ideally) annihilated.
Today, processing timelines for residence permits—be they for workers with temporary or permanent job contracts, or those with French spouses and children—often exceed the expiry dates of old permits. The administration has resorted to giving out three-month-long extensions, often prohibiting non-EU migrants from leaving the Schengen zone in this liminal period. So the stories about missed birth celebrations and family burials back in border-broken homes accumulate in every migrant family.
Today, social-class privilege no longer protects the Global South migrant from administrative humiliation. The path to being a model minority that I—like countless others—have meticulously followed for decades can no longer protect us from becoming illegal, from getting an OQTF, from suddenly losing everything we have constructed.
More than ever, it is time to build solidarity among all migrants with precarious status—be they doctors, engineers, street cleaners, or the unemployed!
