Legitimizing Immigration Control: Empathy, Morality, and Criminality at the U.S.-Mexico Border

• In Event: 581 - Section on International Migration Paper Session. Detention, Deportation, and the Refugee Crisis

Abstract

The moral tension between nations’ sovereign right to territorial control and the human right to mobility is central to normative debates about immigration control. This paper examines how this moral tension shapes the implementation of U.S. border enforcement. Drawing on interviews (n=60), I examine how U.S. Border Patrol agents respond to questions about whether they feel empathy for immigrants who have morally justifiable reasons for breaking immigration law. I document four distinct, yet not mutually exclusive responses to the question of empathy: “strict legalism”, “criminalization”, “ambiguity”, and “benevolent gatekeeper”. In this narratives, the relevance of empathy is a function of the criminality of undocumented immigrants. To illustrate, the “criminalization” narrative characterizes undocumented border crossers as heinous criminals to discard the relevance of empathy, while the “benevolent gatekeeper” highlights instances of agents acting on their empathy toward non-criminal immigrants. I argue that these narratives are not simply products of individual sense-making, but are actually constitutive of a broader category of legitimation work that agents engage in to rationalize and validate their work in response to criticism. As such, these narratives reflect and reproduce the logic underlying the moral economy of U.S. immigration control and shape agents’ work practices. This research contributes to the literature on crimmigration, bureaucratic politics, and the sociology of emotion and morality in law enforcement.

Author

• Irene I. Vega, University of California, Los Angeles