Securing a Right to Health: “Integration Villages” and Medical Citizenship of Roma People in France

A national deportation campaign targeting Romanian Roma in France has recently drawn international criticism from human rights organizations and the European Union. In this context, some French municipalities have created villages d’insertion—integration villages—for some of their Roma residents. Proponents of these spaces have declared that they are humanitarian solutions to the existence of Roma slums in the urban peripheries of many French cities. Yet the creation of a “healthy space” for Roma migrants in the city has also legitimated the further eviction and exclusion of people from “unhealthy slums.” This article is based on ethnographic research among residents of an integration village and a number of unauthorized encampments in Strasbourg, France. This article analyzes the village d’insertion as a contemporary setting where the uneven medical citizenship of Roma migrants in France is being articulated in relation to wider debates about Roma inclusion in Europe. Ultimately, the village d’insertion is a local manifestation of state power, where the division between those deserving and undeserving of public support is reconfigured through the provision and exclusion of access to rights such as health care and shelter.