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‪This article focuses on the experience of young North Africans newcomers in Geneva. Precarised by their wandering and lacking legal status, they find in Geneva a reception infrastructure that allows them to eat and sleep in warm place. However, this hospitality comes at a price: they are forced to follow a set daily routine, determined by the services provided at set times in different reception centres. This way of life combines mobility and immobility, giving the newcomers the impression of being stuck in motion. They then develop escape strategies, notably criminal behaviour, but rarely find any other way out than to go back on the road. Here we analyse the characteristics of this particular hospitality through four trials that they encounter: getting familiar, dwelling, earning a living, and making plans. ‪‪What makes these trials often insurmountable is both the orientation and organisation of the reception infrastructure and the specific situation of this group of young undocumented migrants.‪