Aziz and Sima met near the exquisite tiles and towering minarets of a popular shrine in Tehran. Aziz, a gentle and pensive nineteen-year-old, noticed Sima sitting on a bench, and introduced himself. Sima, he learned, was from the same province in central Afghanistan as he was, and also a Hazara, a historically persecuted ethnic minority. Both of them had fled to Iran as children—Aziz because the Taliban had killed his father, Sima because her family had been threatened with similar violence. Every other week for nearly two years, they met at the same bench; a meaningful friendship blossomed into a profound love. Sima, who is a year older, would tell her family that she was seeing relatives. (“If my family knew about this relationship, believe me, I would be beheaded,” she later told me.) In 2017, the couple decided to marry. Aziz’s mother visited Sima’s family to ask for their blessing. They refused. Sima’s parents felt that Aziz, who worked in construction, was too poor. “If you try to run away with him,” Sima recalled her parents telling her, “we will find you and kill you.”
The following year, the couple scraped together enough money to pay an Islamic scholar to marry them in secret, and a smuggler to help them make a five-hundred-mile journey to Turkey. Within a month of their arrival there, Sima became pregnant. “All of our friends encouraged us to go to France,” Aziz said. In Greece, Sima gave birth to a girl. After another year and a half of travelling, including extended stays in Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, they arrived in Paris, this past January. The sun had not yet risen, and it was raining and cold. The couple, who only spoke Dari, had no specific destination except the name of an iconic landmark, which they had committed to memory: the Eiffel Tower. A worker there offered them tea and called the authorities on their behalf. Aziz held his daughter, now more than a year old, at the base of the tower, and captured a new WhatsApp profile photo. That afternoon, a local organization secured a room for them at a low-cost hotel that had been converted into an emergency shelter. But the space was temporary. A week later, they were on the street.
At the time, France had a backlog of asylum cases. Nicolas Delhopital, the director of the association Famille France-Humanité, told me that asylum seekers in France can wait years to receive a decision on their case. A lack of state-provided housing has meant that migrants are often forced to sleep in makeshift camps, under bridges, and in Métro stations. Last year, the European Court of Human Rights found that France had violated its duties under the European Convention of Human Rights by causing “inhuman and degrading living conditions” for three asylum seekers—from Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran—who claimed that they were forced to sleep on the streets for months before being able to register as asylum seekers. The coronavirus pandemic has only complicated the situation. In March, 2020, during the country’s first lockdown, administrative office closures made it virtually impossible to submit an application for asylum in France. “You stop people from being able to register [for asylum], you stop them from being able to accept legal housing,” Elodie Journeau, an immigration lawyer who works with migrants and asylum seekers in Paris, said. “More isolated women, isolated children, ended up on the streets.”
In response, hundreds of Parisians have joined an ad-hoc shelter system, opening their spare bedrooms and living rooms to house migrants and asylum seekers during the pandemic. The practice first took hold in 2015, as more than a million people—more than half of them from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan—applied for asylum in Europe. France was by no means the primary destination. It fielded more than seventy thousand applications that year, whereas Germany, in the top spot, received nearly five hundred thousand. But the influx was enough to prompt officials in Paris to open a humanitarian center for migrants north of the city, at Porte de la Chapelle. (The center closed in 2018, and was replaced by six similar centers across the Paris region.) Four hundred beds were available for accommodations of five to ten days at a time. Many more people used the space during the day to shower and eat meals. An encampment of some twenty-five hundred unhoused people soon formed nearby. (Months later, the camp was dismantled; inhabitants were bussed to temporary housing in gymnasiums and events centers.)
Yann Manzi and his wife and son founded a volunteer organization, Utopia 56, that provides aid to migrants in France. In 2016, they created a project in Brittany whereby French people could house unaccompanied minors living in a makeshift camp, in Calais, which had come to be known as the Jungle. That same year, when a group of concerned citizens, operating entirely by word of mouth, began opening their homes in Paris to the unhoused migrants in Porte de la Chapelle, Utopia 56 stepped in to formalize the initiative. “We didn’t doubt the generosity of people,” Manzi told me. “However, they need a framework, and they want to know they’re not alone.” During the pandemic, churches and businesses compensated for a slight reduction in hosts. Still, in 2020, Parisians hosted more than three thousand people through Utopia 56.
Many more people register online with the emergency housing program than actually become hosts. “Convincing them to open their doors to strangers is hard,” Marwan Taiebi, the coöordinator of the program, told me. “You need to be helped to do that.” After an initial call with a potential host, a member of Taiebi’s team makes a home visit. Hosts are required to pass a criminal-background check and to sign a form absolving Utopia 56 of responsibility if they become infected with the coronavirus. (So far, there have been no reported cases of COVID-19 spreading between hosts and guests in Paris.) The program has also created a “blacklist” of hosts. “Some hosts expect too much of the families, or are, like, weird people,” Taiebi said. “They don’t realize what the families they are hosting are going through.” Although hosts are welcome to share meals with guests, they are encouraged not to ask too many questions. “Most of the time, the families come, and, in five minutes, they sleep,” Taiebi said.
François Lemeille, a twenty-six-year-old engineer, became a host last fall, after three of his roommates fled Paris’s second lockdown. An acquaintance who was a host with Utopia 56 told Lemeille that the organization was looking for people like him. Lemeille’s roommates agreed to offer up their rooms. “Sometimes, it can cause anxiety,” Lemeille said. He once made pumpkin lasagna for an Eritrean couple who didn’t like it. On another occasion, a guest smoked indoors. And yet, when his roommates returned to Paris, in January, the apartment continued to host families several nights a week. They moved a sofa bed to the corner of the living room and used tall cabinets to separate the space. “When we tell friends, it seems really impressive, but when you see the reality, it’s not,” Lemeille said. “We offer a comfortable place, a shower, and a warm tea. That’s it.”
By the time I met Aziz and Sima, in February, they had spent a month shifting between shelters, hotels, and strangers’ apartments in Paris. We met at the “tea shop,” as they call it, a day center near the Gare d’Austerlitz, in the southeast of the city, where asylum seekers and refugees can shower, do laundry, and eat a warm meal. Aziz had devoted much of the day to calling 115, an emergency hotline for temporary accommodation and other services. During the pandemic, the line’s operators in Paris have been overwhelmed, receiving a thousand calls per day. Upward of three hundred and fifty of them are requests for housing that cannot be filled. That day, Aziz and Sima were among the unlucky ones.
When the center closed, at 4 P.M., they packed their baby stroller and other belongings—snacks, phone chargers, a folder of documents—and boarded the Métro. “I do not have one euro in my pocket,” Aziz told me. “When I travel by train, the people of France buy tickets for us.” Their daughter blew kisses to other passengers, one of whom gifted her a Snickers bar. An hour later, the family arrived at the Rosa Parks station, in the northeastern outskirts of the city, next to a strip mall and a movie theatre. At the time, Utopia 56 ran its emergency hosting program from a nearby storefront. (It has since changed the location to Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, in the city’s center, to highlight the state’s failure to provide shelter.) That evening, a crowd of some fifty people gathered. Many of them had been there before. A woman from Côte d’Ivoire sat on a concrete slab, pressing henna on her nails. She greeted Aziz and Sima, and handed their daughter a vanilla pudding.
Registration for housing began at 6 P.M., as a citywide curfew set in. In a nearby office, a volunteer texted hosts to check on their availability. Eight churches were on standby, including one named Saint-Luc, which had recently hosted a family of fifteen in a room usually devoted to reading the Catechism. Volunteers communicated through a WhatsApp group, matching families with hosts. A volunteer named Élise Longé, who is sixty-three, told Aziz and Sima that a young couple living across the city, near Porte d’Orléans, would host and feed them that night. Longé accompanied them on the Métro ride. On the way, she told me that, until retiring, this past September, she worked as an operator for the 115 emergency hotline in Seine-Saint-Denis, a department just north of Paris. Wait times could be as long as three hours, she said, at which point the call automatically disconnects. “People are at their wit’s end, and they cry on the phone,” she said. “They beg.” When I asked her about the quality of the shelters, which are often situated in converted low-cost hotels, Longé sighed. “Oh là là,” she said. “Now we’re lifting the cover.”
Around 8 P.M., after roughly an hour on the Métro, Longé, Aziz, and Sima arrived in the tranquil Petit-Montrouge neighborhood. Longé pointed to a nondescript brick building. The apartment was a fifth-floor walkup; Sima carried their daughter, and Longé helped Aziz with the stroller up the narrow staircase. Longé knocked on the door, and a couple, named Guillaume and Thérèse, welcomed the family into their four-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment. The family stood at the doorway and waved goodbye to Longé. “Merci,” Aziz called out.
