Hospitality is a particular form of the gift that involves temporary sharing of space, and sometimes also time, bodies, food and other consumables. The issue of temporality is critical. It is possible to imagine a permanent guest, but it is also a kind of contradiction in terms, as Kant points out. Like the gift, hospitality is, strictly speaking (if we follow Derrida’s logic) impossible in a pure form (but remembering that it is importantly, inevitably, a breaking down of purity…) Derrida refers to this necessary and impossible welcoming of the other – with absolutely no conditions attached - as the Law of hospitality. In a less strict sense it is one of the most common and crucial forms of generosity across a range of cultures – and its universality (or our belief in its universality) is one of the key features of the relation. Like the gift, hospitality, as we commonly experience it, is a social practice, governed by a moral code – the laws of hospitality as Derrida puts it. Beyond moral and social relations between individuals, hospitality will be evoked with respect to relations between different nations or between nations and individuals of a different nationality. This analysis would be informed by the work done or being done by a number of French theorists (including Levinas and Derrida and, very recently, Irigaray) on hospitality – much of which moves between Kant (and other philosophical reference points including Heidegger) and certain pressing contemporary political exigencies. Hospitality implies letting the other in to oneself, to one’s own space – it can be invasive of the integrity of the self, or the domain of the self. This is why it is may be seen as both foundational (to be fully human is to be able to alter, to be altered) and dangerous. The response to the potential for violence is often to impose restrictions or conditions, to limit hospitality. But limitations themselves can provoke transgression – if they are a gesture of mastery, reinforcing the imbalance of power that creates the need for hospitality in the first place. This paper will explore contemporary French theorisations of hospitality, setting these against the socio-political context of the arrival of what are variously perceived as immigrants with or without papers, asylum-seekers or refugees.