This article is inspired by a series of research studies promoting an “historical ethnography of administrative work.” One of their assumptions is that the ethnographic method should be reported to historical research as it allows to shed light on practices that are sometimes difficult to grasp in the present because of the lack of access to the research field(s). This article examines the daily work of the asylum screening process, in France, since the creation of the administrative body in charge (OFPRA) in 1952 until the early 1970s. It focuses on the social properties, trajectories, and practices of the agents of this administration, by combining ethnographic and historical approaches, and as grasped through archival sources and testimonies. The article shows that the refugee screening work depends on OFPRA’s recruitment logic as well as on the ideological and diplomatic considerations of both the French government and OFPRA’s agents, that all tend to converge. It also shows that the social properties of these agents as well as their practices marked by a conception of the refugee as an “orphan of the national,” and by the weight of asylum seekers’ nationalities in the screening process, are in line with the practices and the international conventions of the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis therefore contributes to challenging the widespread idea of the creation of OFPRA, and more so of the Geneva Convention, as major turns in the international refugee regime.