The Border Inside – Organizational Socialization of Street-level Bureaucrats in the European Migration Regime (original) (raw)

Encounters of Despair: Street-Level Bureaucrat and Migrant Interactions in Sweden and Switzerland

Anthropologica

Encounters between street-level bureaucrats and the so-called “client of the state” – here the migrant individual with precarious legal status – are characterized by great power imbalances. The dependency relationships that emerge out of public administrative encounters need to be understood as spaces of continuous asymmetrical negotiations. Emotions play a crucial role, not only as a translation of how migrants and bureaucrats mutually shape, contest, and reproduce migration control, but also as a strategic component and a tool for negotiation. Supported by ethnographic data from a Swiss Cantonal Migration Office and a Swedish Border Police Unit, collected between 2016 and 2017, I argue that emotions interweave all migrant-bureaucrat interactions. Their analysis discloses not only the emotional labour of migration enforcement, but also how it is translated into bureaucratically enacted practices, which include physical force, vocal exchanges, documents and spatial means, leading to...

Migrants serving migrants? Representative bureaucracy at the front lines of migration management

The ways in which minority street-level bureaucrats construe their identities as state representatives and as representatives of minority clients are known to inform their discretionary behavior toward clients, thereby shaping policy outcomes. While existing studies have examined race and ethnicity as shared identities between minority bureaucrats and clients, the role of "migrant" identity has been overlooked. Focusing on the so-called European migration crisis of 2015-2017, this study addresses this gap. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrant bureaucrats, it examines how being simultaneously a migrant and a migration policy implementer shapes bureaucratic discretion. This article introduces the notion of "migrant representative" and identifies four profiles of migrant bureaucrats, each corresponding to different degrees of identification with the local migration management system and the migrant clients. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on representative bureaucracy and the debate on the linkage between passive and active representation.

Shaping migration at the border: the entangled rationalities of border control practices

Comparative Migration Studies

This article analyses how border guards as members of a state organisation shape the movement of non-nationals into the territory of a nation state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the Swiss Border Guard (SBG), it explores the rationalities—understood as stabilised ways of reasoning and acting—that characterise practices within this state organisation. Combining organisational and structuration theory with a street-level bureaucracy perspective allows for a differentiated analysis of the various facets of border guards’ everyday work. Four rationalities of border-control practices are identified and compared: security, humanitarian, cost-calculation, and pragmatic rationality. I argue that, by considering both the specific goals and imperatives of border control and the characteristics of street-level bureaucrats acting within a state organisation, these entangled logics explain the complex and incoherent social reality of border control. More generally, the results contribute to...

Bureaucratic Routes to Migration Migrants' Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration Intermediaries

Anthropologica, 2021

For a number of migrant actors, bureaucratic processes related to immigration constitute the greater part of the route toward their aspired destination and significantly shape their experience of migration and forced immobility. This special issue takes a look at the meaningful ways in which migrant actors interact with immigration bureaucracies and at how administrative procedures, with their highly emotional potential, shape in turn the subjectivity, decisions and actions of migrant actors. All the articles here analyse immigration bureaucracy as a dynamic process mediated by a network of people and by material objects (for example, documents, forms). Whether work, marriage or refuge is the reason for migration, the period of waiting in administrative limbo-which can last years-is crucial to our understanding of the bureaucratic encounter as a social force. This issue, dedicated to migrants' lived experience of paperwork, clerks and other immigration intermediaries, explores two aspects of migrant actors' encounters with immigration bureaucracies that go beyond the specificities of each individual's personal background and trajectory: the production of affects and bureaucratic agency; the former often being the driving force behind the latter.

The Office Ethos and Ethics in Migration Bureaucracies 1

The bureaucratic production of difference, 2020

What do they think they're doing? All the contributions to this book engage with this particular question. Following the intricate analyses of what bureaucrats do, we now wish to consider what they think they're doing. While their answers might be interpreted as neutralisation strategies – ex post justifications for actions that are shaped by a myriad of concerns – we hold that tracing what bureaucrats think they are doing is worthwhile for two reasons. First, we believe that what they think they should do shapes what they actually do as much as other constraints, whether this concerns their efforts (successful or unsuccessful) to act in what they consider an ideal manner or the formation of rationales for diverging from ideal behaviour. Second, we claim that their thinking is shaped by notions of the “office”, i.e., the duties and obligations of an admin-istration related to specific political projects. Exploring what bureaucrats think they do tells us about the delineation and definition of the moral com-munity that a bureaucratic apparatus is concerned with. To explore what they think they do, we employ the concept of ethics as the basis for investigating the value rationality of bureaucratic practice and its normative orientations. To understand how “rule following” works, we need to attend to the ethics of office, because bureaucratic ethics defines how a specific idea of the commonweal is served. It delineates moral communities composed of those abiding in the common good from others who are excluded. In order to understand how certain political projects of specific governmentalities are put in place, we must heed the ethos and ethics at play at specific historical points in the administrative apparatus.

In Search of a Normal Life: An ethnography of migrant irregularity in Northern Europe

This research targets interactions between irregularized migrants and their various civil society supporters in “Marenburg”, a merged city that combines the settings of Hamburg, Stockholm, and Helsinki. The empirical research took place between 2014 and 2016. The dissertation focuses mainly on the situation before “the long summer of migration”, which began in 2015. The research question is how the representations of migrant irregularity are constructed in interactions between migrants and the local civil society. I focus on the tension between migrants aspiring to “normal life” and the contradictory expectations of their vulnerability, which materialize as criteria to be a “deserving” migrant in three specific contexts: first, when migrants demand their rights (the Lampedusa in Hamburg group as a part of the refugee movement); secondly, when migrants meet supportive civil society organizations in the context of services; and, lastly, when civil society organizations participate in customary consultations of legislation processes. The main research methods were participant observation and walking together with a person seeking for solution for their irregularity. The theoretical framework of my research relies on Engin F. Isin’s work on acts of citizenship, particularly the idea of citizenship beyond formal belonging, as a process where outsiders challenge the existing idea of citizenship of 8 citizen-insiders by demanding rights which belong to citizens. This offers a frame to analyse relations between the city, its migrant-outsiders, and civil society actors as supporters of migrants. The interactions where different actors demand rights for migrants reveal negotiations between the normal that is aspired to and expectations of vulnerability. These negotiations challenge citizenship but also reproduce unwanted features of citizenship, such as neoliberal worker-citizenship, or civil society actors’ role as professionals, which positions migrants as objects of care.

Unhuman Institutions: the emotion work of migration street-level bureaucrats

This paper deals with the role of bureucrats within the asylum process. I argue that bureaucrats are also vulnerable to become indifferent in a structure that pushes the boundaries of humanity by locating people in strict categorical compounds. I explore theories such as street- level bureaucracy, emotion work and others.

The (In)Securitization of Migration: Governing Migrant Bodies in Switzerland and Beyond [COURSE]

2023

This is the course I have been offering at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) for the last three years. It undertakes a semester-long inquiry into the repressive government of human mobilities, examining how migration is socially constituted as a security threat and interrogating the effects of power that such construction generates. The analytical focus is on bodies both as a surface on which ‘regimes of truth’ are inscribed and as a material site where domination operates and forms of resistance appear. The course is bilingual (English-French), it includes a couple of guest lectures every year and it draws on documentary films.

Migrant Agency: Negotiating Borders and Migration Controls

Policy, media, activist and academic discourses often portray migrants and refugees in the extreme, as victims or villains. This portrayal obscures the agency demonstrated by migrants and refugees and evidenced in their own accounts of their journeys. It also reifies the power of the state to ‘secure’ borders and control migration, and conceals the contested politics of mobility and security visible in negotiations between migrants, borders guards, smugglers, fishermen, and other actors. In this article, I take an ethnographic approach and conceptualises the border from the bottom up as a contested site of negotiation. The analysis reveals the ways in which migrants negotiate with their smugglers, amongst themselves, and with borders guards in order to circumvent state controls when entering the state clandestinely. In doing so, it questions traditional conceptualizations of sovereignty, security and citizenship. The article then analyses how migrants continue to demonstrate agency after arrival within state territories, and how this agency can have an impact not only an micro, everyday encounters, but also on the macro level: my research demonstrates how migrant agency can have causal and constitutive effects on state relations and power. The article draws on participant observation and over 130 interviews I conducted with migrants, refugees, fishermen, NGO representations, and policymakers between 2007 and 2015 in Malta and Cyprus.