Using Ignorance as (Un)Conscious Bureaucratic Strategy: Street-Level Practices and Structural Influences in the Field of Migration Enforcement

Street-level bureaucrats working in the field of migration enforcement have the uneasy task of finding irregularised migrants and processing their cases – often until deportation. As the encounters are unforeseeable and characterised by tension and emotions, bureaucrats develop practices and strategies, which help them to manage the often very personal encounters. Besides the frequently debated strategies summarised under the term ‘copying mechanisms’ and the problem of ‘dirty’ or many hands, ignorance as a tactic in the daily work of bureaucrats has not been studied to a sufficient extent. This work looks at how ignorance, including deliberate not-knowing or blinding out, as well as undeliberate partial-knowing or being kept ignorant, is used in public administration, through multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork in migration offices and border police/guard offices of three Schengen Member States: Sweden, Switzerland and Latvia. It distinguishes between structural and individual ignorance, which both have the ability to limit migrant’s agency. Further, by analysing their intertwined relation, this article furthers our understanding of how uncertainty and a lack of accountability become results of everyday bureaucratic encounters. Ignorance thus obscures state practices, subjecting migrants with precarious legal status to structural violence

Informing for the sake of it: legal intricacies, acceleration and suspicion in the German and Swiss migration regimes

In migration law, being informed about legal and administrative procedures constitutes an essential procedural safeguard. Yet, in practice, the transparency of legal practices is often structurally undermined, resulting in the curtailment of procedural safeguards and potentially affecting perceptions of procedural justice. Building on our multi-sited ethnographic research in Germany and Switzerland, we first argue that migrants find it often difficult to anticipate how laws work, contradicting the key procedural law principle of legal certainty. Second, a general trend towards acceleration in migration administration allows limited time for information to reach migrants on the ground, leaving them uninformed about legal procedures. Third, migration law is implemented in an atmosphere of suspicion, which has a negative impact on trust between migrants and state officials – and on transparency. We thus demonstrate how procedural safeguards become empty and routinised, aggravating the structural violence at the heart of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in interactions with the state

Book review: Nordic nationalism and penal order: walling the welfare state by Vanessa Barker

In Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State, Vanessa Barker offers an account of the preconditions that allowed for the recent increase in restrictive migration policies in Sweden. Deconstructing the overly romanticised image of a welcoming welfare state through a longitudinal study, the book presents a sharp, rich and alarming analysis that will be of particular interest to those exploring the convergence of migration, crime and punishment, finds Lisa Marie Borrelli

Using Ignorance as (Un)Conscious bureaucratic Strategy: Street-Level Practices and structural Influences in the Field of Migration Enforcement

Street-level bureaucrats working in the field of migration enforcement have the uneasy task of finding irregularised migrants and processing their cases – often until deportation. As the encounters are unforeseeable and characterised by tension and emotions, bureaucrats develop practices and strategies, which help them to manage the often very personal encounters. Besides the frequently debated strategies summarised under the term ‘copying mechanisms’ and the problem of ‘dirty’ or many hands, ignorance as a tactic in the daily work of bureaucrats has not been studied to a sufficient extent. This work looks at how ignorance, including deliberate not-knowing or blinding out, as well as undeliberate partial-knowing or being kept ignorant, is used in public administration, through multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork in migration offices and border police/guard offices of three Schengen Member States: Sweden, Switzerland and Latvia. It distinguishes between structural and individual ignorance, which both have the ability to limit migrant’s agency. Further, by analysing their intertwined relation, this article furthers our understanding of how uncertainty and a lack of accountability become results of everyday bureaucratic encounters. Ignorance thus obscures state practices, subjecting migrants with precarious legal status to structural violence

They know the procedure ; they just don’t know when we will come ::uncovering the practice of unannounced deportations

Migration control and its enforcement represent a specific policy field, defined by the state’s authorisation to use coercive regulation against migrants with precarious legal status, including forceful deportation. While the analysis of deportation as a ‘technology of citizenship’ has been developed historically, politically and, from the perspective of migrants, this work advances an ethnographic study of migration enforcement agencies in Switzerland, Germany and Sweden with a focus on street-level understandings of unannounced deportation procedures. As argued, unannounced deportations are at the very end of the coercive continuum, used to increase the deportability of migrant individuals or rather their ‘willingness’. The analysed data advances three particular street-level understandings regarding the use of the practice: First, state agents understand unannounced deportations as caused by the migrants’ alleged noncompliant behaviour, underlining migrants’ responsibility for bringing the procedure upon themselves and therefore allowing bureaucrats to use force. Second, agents understand their work as humane, using the nondisclosure of removal dates as a practice that keeps respective deportees ‘safe’. Thirdly, an underlying pragmatism exists, based on the need to implement ‘law and order’, with a disruptive effect for migrant individuals. States thus construct boundaries of belonging through deportation, legitimised by state agents’ reflections

Between suspicion, nicknames, and trust—renegotiating ethnographic access with Swedish border police

Purpose – This article contributes the following: First, it argues along previous works that rites of passage include continuous testing, which needs to be passed in order to gain a certain level of acceptance within the research field. Here besides the emotional effort, researchers have to position themselves and are confronted with questions of trust. Second, it is argued that the collected and analysed data on the rites of passage enable us to make sense of street-level bureaucrats’ work and functioning of state institutions, especially in a police context. Reflections on research negotiations drew the author’s attention to how mistrust towards the “other”, here defined as migrant other, prevails the migration regime. This mistrust is later transferred onto the researcher, whose stay is deemed questionable and eventually intrusive. Design/methodology/approach – The collected data include semi-structured interviews, as well as several months of participant observation with street-level officers and superordinate staff, deepening previous discussions on research access and entrance. It further allows understanding street-level narratives, especially when it comes to the culture of suspicion embedded in police work, connecting the experienced tests with the everyday knowledge of police officers and case workers. Findings – The analysis of rites of passage enable us to make sense of street-level bureaucrats’ work, especially in a police context, since we find a specific way of suspicion directed towards the researcher. It is based on a general mistrust towards the “other”, here defined as migrant other, whose stay is deemed illegal and thus intruding. In this context, the positionality of the researcher becomes crucial and needs strategical planning. Research limitations/implications – Accessing and being able to enter the “field” is of crucial relevance to researchers, interested in studying, e.g. sense-making and decision-making of the respective interlocutors. Yet, ethnographic accounts often disclose only partially, which hurdles, limiting or contesting their aspirations to conduct fieldwork, were encountered. Originality/value – The personal role of researchers, their background and emotions are often neglected when describing ethnographic research. Struggles and what these can say about the studied field are thus left behind, although they contribute to a richer understanding of the functioning of the chosen fields. This work will examine how passing the test and going through rituals of “becoming a member” can tell us more about the functioning of a government agency, here a Swedish border police unit

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

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 what Walters (2006) coined “political economies of violence” (438).Les interactions entre les bureaucrates de la rue et les soi-disant « clients de l’État » – en l’occurrence des individus migrants au statut juridique précaire - sont marquées par de grandes inégalités de pouvoir. Les relations de dépendance engendrées dans les rencontres avec les administrations publiques doivent être comprises comme des espaces de négociations asymétriques et continues. Les émotions y jouent un rôle central, non seulement comme reflet de la manière dont les migrants et les bureaucrates façonnent, contestent et reproduisent le contrôle migratoire, mais aussi en tant que composante stratégique et outil de négociation. Sur la base de données ethnographiques recueillies entre 2016 et 2017 dans un office cantonal de la migration en Suisse et une unité de police des frontières en Suède, je soutiens que les émotions imprègnent toutes les interactions entre les migrants et les bureaucrates. L’analyse de ces dernières donne à voir non seulement le travail émotionnel du contrôle migratoire, mais aussi comment celui-ci se traduit en pratiques bureaucratiques, lesquelles comprennent la force physique, les échanges verbaux, les documents et les moyens spatiaux, conduisant à ce que Walters (2006) a appelé une « économie politique de la violence » (438)

Tracing the circulation of emotions in Swiss migration enforcement: organizational dissonances, emotional contradictions and frictions

Migration enforcement is an emotional field displaying conflicting positions and tensions between bureaucrats and migrants, and within and between organiza-tions. This article conducts an in-depth analysis of emotions within organizational encounters and the role that emotions play between organizations and in the outcome of cases. It examines how emotions directed towards other agencies shape an organizational work ethos and professional standing. Using ethno-graphic data collected in Swiss migration offices, social services offices and legal counselling offices, this article discloses how such actors ‘feel’ each other and therefore indirectly show how they ‘feel’ the ‘state’ and its policies regarding the creation of migrant subjects and their integration and belonging. While social workers and legal advisors often understand migration policies as restrictive towards migrant individuals, migration officials find themselves in the role of the state defender. Studying their emotions thus facilitates an analysis of the discrepancies between different agencies in the realm of migration administra-tion and of their emotional dissonance, which characterize the migration regime

Transformation towards a sustainable society : key intervention areas

Social innovations, which transform resource intensive routines and practices into low-resource ones, combined with socio-technically designed transition paths, which are created around sustainability and environmental criteria, are milestones for implementation and diffusion of SCP (Sustainable Consumption and Production). This paper analyses such processes based on eight key components in order to evaluate and explain transformation and transition towards a sustainable lifestyle. Actors on all levels of society are included in this approach, creating a whole framework. Global megatrends, such as climate change, demographic change or resource scarcity will be put into relation with current policies and production trends, which play an important role for the development of transition pathways and future scenarios. This will enable us to work out guidelines and ideas on how to create a more sustainable society specifically