Abstract

In the wake of emerging work proposing to focus on legal intermediaries in the study of international migration, this article looks at professional visa applications for France, and «talent passports» in particular, as collective productions. The analysis is based on a five-month ethnographic study carried out in a Franco-Tunisian company located in Tunis and Paris, which develops software for the financial markets. The company regularly sends some of its engineers to work in France on its own behalf or on behalf of its clients, and is therefore responsible for most of the visa application procedure. Borrowing principally from the sociology of work and the sociology of gender, and relating legal-administrative practices to the positions, trajectories and dispositions of those who carry them out, the article unfolds the relational dimension of intermediation work and highlights the social division of labour, both hierarchical and gendered, which organises the legal intermediation for «privileged migrants».