Legal Standards and Moral Worth in Frontline Decision-Making: Evaluations of Victimization in US Asylum Determinations

• In Event: 3151 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Theoretical Approaches to Global Change and Challenges – B

Abstract

What is the role of moral values in legal settings that rely on a routinized processing of cases? Ethnographers have given us incisive studies of decision making in social control institutions. They offer many examples of frontline agents who must negotiate shared understandings of moral worth (e.g. who is deserving of benefits/punishment), that conflict with established legal categories (e.g. who formally qualifies for benefits/punishment). This study investigates the theoretical importance of this discordance: how does the disconnect between the moral goals of an institution and its legal rules shape the decision-making process? In this talk, I discuss my analysis of US asylum status determinations, based on interviews with asylum officials and textual analysis of caselaw and agency regulations, to demonstrate that decision-making is comprised of moments where moral worth and established legal rules do not always align. The accordance or discordance between legal categories and moral worth undergirds the process by which frontline asylum officers differentiate between genuine “victims” and “criminal” immigrants. Through interviews with asylum officers, I learned that when officers are presented with applicants whom they perceive as “undeserving” but whose accounts of violence and victimization easily correspond to established legal categories, agents focus on policing the credibility of these applicants, with heightened suspicion. Surprisingly, when asylum officers encounter applicants they consider morally “deserving” but whose claims lack a legal basis, they question the meaning and scope of the agency screening standards that govern asylum requests, and implicitly affirm the credibility of the applicants themselves. I conclude by discussing the significance of these findings for understanding the role of deliberation within highly institutionalized settings of social control, the production of social inequality, and how moral orders as interpreted by frontline agents of the state, define the connection of immigration and legality.

Author

• Talia Shiff, Harvard University