Being a Young Person “Stranded Abroad”: The Case of Egyptian Students who came to Study in France and their Experiences during the COVID-19 Crisis

The first phase of the COVID-19 health crisis, between March and July 2020, inaugurated an unprecedented international situation in terms of the movement of people. The issue of those “stranded abroad” became widespread in the field of international migration, at the level of the management of national states, but also in their double experience of crisis between the host context and the context of origin: between physical presence and distanced experience. This article proposes a case study on how this first phase of health measures was experienced by Egyptian students and young professionals living in France at the time of the outbreak of the epidemic. We question the meaning of being “stranded abroad” for this population — who most often conceive their migration as temporary — in terms of their experience. We also wanted to show how this was an issue for the Egyptian government when it had to organise repatriation in this brutal context of international mobility. This aspect also reveals the difficulty of exposure to contradictory health and administrative injunctions between both countries, where strategies of adaptation and negotiation must be developed in the face of national contexts and authorities, while at the same time holding on to the transnational links available to this population which has come to study in France.