‘Vulnerability’ is increasingly propagated and contested in international and domestic governance of migration and international protection. In this article, I draw on participant observation and interviews with governance actors, civil society organizations, and migrants in Marseille to discuss the struggles that take shape around the understanding and operationalization of vulnerability on the ground. I argue that in their current form, vulnerability assessments mainly serve a ‘filtering’ function to narrow down access to the ‘material conditions of reception’. The French authorities do this, not only by prioritizing pre-defined categories of ‘vulnerable people’, but also through increasingly narrowing the scope of who are included in specific categories. This was particularly evident in the essentialized, but also contradictory, approach to gendered vulnerabilities. Civil society organisations and migrants make strategic, political and affective use of the notion of vulnerability in ways that sometimes uphold state uses, or that may inadvertently uphold and produce structural inequalities. At the same time, such actors also importantly challenge the filtering function of vulnerability and the authorities’ failure to take into account the state’s structural implication in the production of migrants’ precarity.