The influx of refugees into France since 2015 has been framed as a crisis and marked by a restrictive turn in arrival and asylum policies. By comparison, in the 1970s Southeast Asian refugees fleeing from communist regimes were welcomed warmly in the country. This article compares two in-depth case studies of refugees, analysed using the biographical policy evaluation method, to retrace how the policies and collective representations of these two different historical moments affect the experiences of refugees over time. It shows that policies play a significant role in shaping refugees’ experiences in respect of their access to papers, housing, language courses and work, thus impacting, but not determining, their possibilities of reconstructing life in exile. The comparison also raises the question of how personal experiences of arrival, viewed as a rejection or a welcome, influence refugees’ life courses.