Call For Change
Asylum seekers in France protest a restriction on cash withdrawal of their social benefits.
By Liz Donovan
On a frigid, windy morning last winter, Mulham Hendawy bundled up and set out on what was supposed to be a productive day. Hendawy, a Syrian journalist who migrated to Paris from Egypt in December 2018, had a meeting scheduled at an immigration centre to sort out some paperwork related to his asylum case. But after traveling across the city to get there, an administrative issue prevented him from getting anything done. “I remember [the day] was just filled with rubbish,” he said. “The bureaucracy here is a bit hard on us [asylum seekers].”
Defeated and cold, he returned home to his small room and eyed a growing pile of dirty laundry. He decided to cut his losses and use the free time to complete chores. “I wanted to win my day back,” he said. He reached for a small bag of loose change, dumped out a heap of 10- and 20-cent coins, and counted. Laundromats in Paris charge about four or five euros a load to wash, and more to dry. Hendawy had two. Just like that, his bad day got worse.
As a registered asylum seeker in France, Hendawy was eligible for a monthly allowance — called the “allocation pour demandeurs d’asile” or “ADA.” The funds are accessible through a debit card provided by the French government’s Office of Immigration and Integration (OFII). Individuals without housing assistance collect 460 euros a month; those with housing receive about 200. This year, the French government has distributed an average of about 43 million euros per month through the program.
But in November 2019, OFII removed one of the primary functions of the card. Now, asylum seekers can no longer withdraw cash. The change was made for reasons of security — to prevent theft or loss of the funds, explained Didier Leschi, OFII’s director general. “These are asylum seekers who often live in precarious conditions,” he explained by email in French. “The payment card has the advantage of being a virtual piggy bank; your money remains protected by the code attached to your card.”
Asylum seekers, though, say the shift has been a growing source of frustration and has compounded an already challenging circumstance. To make transactions that don’t allow card payments, recipients of the benefits, like Hendawy, are left to the mercy of friends or strangers willing to exchange a swipe of a card for hard cash. “It makes you feel like you don’t have a choice with your financial dealings,” Hendawy said. “Yes, it’s aid from the government, but we are getting the aid because we are not allowed to work.”
Advocacy groups, including the UN Refugee Agency and the Migration Policy Institute, argue that the restriction prevents asylum seekers from handling their finances with dignity and that use of the card can have a stigmatizing effect, similar to food stamps. They also point out that asylum seekers are now being pushed to larger French corporate supermarkets, where they don’t have to meet a minimum purchase amount, rather than to small businesses. And when they need cash, cardholders have to seek creative solutions, including paying fees to store managers willing to give cash back — sometimes for a price.
After Mahamat Adam, an asylum seeker from Chad, arrived in France in December 2018, he had a custom of visiting the markets in his neighborhood on Fridays and Saturdays. “All the people come from far to buy from the market,” he said. “It’s cheaper.” The vendors, though, often don’t accept cards — or they require minimum purchase amounts not easily met from one or two items. Since the change, he’s instead been shopping at Carrefour and Lidl, two major supermarket chains in France.
Given the option, many asylum seekers, like Adam, would not shop at larger chain supermarkets, said Delphine Morand, who volunteers with the organization Migrants Bienvenue 34 in Montpelier. “They would usually go to markets to buy fresh fruits, vegetables, and meat — places where they can’t pay with a credit card.”
The reason for this is trifold. Items at farmers’ markets tend to be cheaper because they’re sold by the farmers without distribution costs. And culturally, the markets are more familiar to the shopping experience in the home countries of some asylum seekers, explains Morand. Finally, going to a store owned by someone who speaks the same language as the shopper would eliminate the communication barrier that makes financial transactions more confusing and uncomfortable. “Most of the asylum seekers or undocumented immigrants go to small businesses because they go to businesses where they can speak,” explained Elodie Journeau, an immigration lawyer in Paris.
The COVID-19 health crisis has made these points temporarily moot. As of March 23, the French government ordered that all outdoor markets remain closed during the “confinement” period.
Cultural differences can also lead to technical problems. “[Those of us] from other countries, we don’t deal with this kind of card,” said Mohammed, a Syrian refugee who asked that his last name not be used. Mohammed’s friend, who is also from Syria and was unfamiliar with a debit card, entered his pin number incorrectly too many times and locked himself out of his account. To fix it, Mohammed said, the friend had to travel to Rouen, a city in the north of France, about 135 kilometres (83 miles) from Paris, where the card was issued. It took three trips there by train, totaling about 100 euros — almost a fourth of his monthly allowance — to successfully reactivate the card.
The administrative issues with the card will be further complicated this year. The cards currently in circulation in France have to be replaced by August due to the expiration of a five-year contract with Up France, which operates the card. The new contract will remain the same, but asylum seekers must make an appointment to go to a “reception centre” to have their cards replaced. The office is currently in the process of contacting individuals via telephone, SMS, and in-person to inform them, but advocates are concerned about the logistics of replacing some 120,000 cards.
Despite these individuals’ experiences, Leschi, of OFII, maintains that the change has improved the asylum seekers’ access to funds. “We found that the overall amount of payment expenditure from the ADA card is higher than the amount of withdrawals that were made from the ATM,” he said. “This is an objective element that allows us to say that the payment card is well used by asylum seekers.” The most recent data from OFII shows that the amount of money spent using the ADA card was about 4.5 percent higher in November 2019 — the month the “no-cash” rule went into effect — than the previous month.
Some asylum seekers agree that the card is more convenient. Muhammed, for instance, said he was not bothered by the shift. “When you pay with a card, you spend less money than with cash,” he said. “If you pay 97, you really spend 100 because you lose the change.”
He noted, though, that he has a bank account with funds he brought from his home country so that he can access cash if he needs to make a small purchase, like cigarettes or a baguette. “You cannot use [a card] if you are paying less than five or 10 euros,” he said. “Some markets don’t accept that.”
Once a week, a group of asylum seekers pile into Delphine Morand’s car and go grocery-store hopping around Montpelier. If they’re lucky, a store manager working that day will be feeling generous enough to overcharge them for a purchase on the card and give cash back out of the register. (A “cash back” debit option is not available in French stores as it is at most registers in the U.S., for example.)
“Prohibiting this was technically impossible,” said Leschi of OFII.
Morand said some Casino stores in the region are usually safe bets for this service. But it depends who is working that day and as word gets out, she said, it’s becoming more difficult. One Casino store had to stop the service completely because of too many requests. “The line was so huge — the [asylum seekers] all gathered there,” she said.
Leschi argues that this workaround can be a way “to ‘solve’ potential cash problems,” but it puts the burden on asylum seekers — and advocates who help them — to find a store willing to do the service. This task has become even more challenging during the COVID-19 crisis, Morand said.
Others take more creative approaches, like waiting at a gas station and offering to pay for strangers’ gas with their card in exchange for cash, explained Muhammed. This solution is not ideal or technically legal. “They push us to the black market,” he said.
Other vendors are taking advantage of the situation by charging asylum seekers for the cash exchange, cutting into their already tight budget. Adrian Cornec, who works at CEDRE, a social centre for migrants in the outskirts of Paris, said that some asylum seekers wait around at supermarkets and restaurants near the centre and ask for cash back. But many charge a fee of 10 or 20 percent. “The problem is people give less money than the amount [they charge],” he said.
The irony in this development is that restricting cash was intended to limit asylum seekers from participating in illegal activities, according to Leschi. He said that the measure prevents migrants from using their benefits to pay outstanding fees to human traffickers who escorted them into the country.
There are other illegal but practical uses that are common in the refugee community in France, explained Journeau. For example, asylum seekers may use cash to buy contraband (like cigarettes) that they could resell or to pay rent to so-called “sleep merchants,” who illegally house more than a dozen migrants in flats. “It’s to block a parallel economy on the black market,” she said.
But, she added, the thinking behind preventing these activities was short-sighted. As of December 2019, fewer than 50 percent of asylum seekers in France had been provided with accommodations, according to the European Centre on Refugees and Exiles. The rest have the choice to pay sleep merchants—with cash — or set up a tent in a camp. “Since we don’t have the means to house everyone, we are preventing people from eating and sleeping,” said Journeau. “It’s horrible to have 15 people in a room, but it’s better than sleeping on the street.”
In addition to funneling the funds back into the French economy, restricting cash prevents people from abusing the asylum system by living on the benefits, or sending the funds to family in their countries of origin, even if they are not likely to be approved for protection, explained Morand.
The number of asylum seekers coming into France — and other European countries — has increased steadily over the past several years, clogging the system and delaying decisions. The result is that more people are remaining registered as asylum seekers — and collecting benefits — for longer, explains Dr. Hanne Beirens, director of Migration Policy Institute Europe.
Of the 95,577 asylum cases that received decisions last year, only 23.6 percent were approved, according to France’s Ministry of Interior. Of the top five countries of origin for asylum seekers in France for 2019, only one — Afghanistan — had an approval rate of more than 19 percent.
Still, Beirens argued that limiting access to benefits is not the answer. “If it’s about abuse, that’s what you need to tackle as a government,” she said. “Otherwise, you’re penalizing those who are genuine asylum seekers. You’re limiting their dignity and their ability to live in France.”
At the time of the “no cash” change, Hendawy lived with about a dozen other migrants at the Maison des Journalistes, a nonprofit in the 15th district of Paris that provides housing for journalists seeking asylum for up to six months. He didn’t have to pay rent, fortunately, but he still needed cash for smaller transactions and coin-operated machines, such as at the laundromat.
Typically, he would ask a roommate to lend him cash in exchange for a beer or two that he would buy with his ADA card. No one was home that afternoon, so he gave up on chores and walked to a boulangerie to get a fresh baguette. But on his way, he realized he would either have to pay with a handful of change, holding up the line, or ask if he could use his card for a one-euro purchase. Both options were too humiliating, he decided, and his day had been bad enough. Instead he picked up a bottle of wine and retreated back to his room to watch Netflix on a spotty Internet connection.
Hendawy was eventually able to wash his clothes later that week. “I waited till I saw the first person I could take cash from,” he recalled. He bought the person beer with his card in exchange.
In February, though, his luck began to shift. Hendawy, who now lives with his girlfriend, received news that his asylum case was successful. He now has refugee status in France.
But as a refugee his ADA card is no longer valid, and the COVID-19 crisis has delayed the processing of the benefits he’ll receive under his new status. It’s also prevented him from finding a job as a bartender now that he is legally allowed to work. For at least a little longer, he said, he has to rely on his girlfriend to spot him when he needs change.
“I just want to do my laundry, man!”