Asylum Decision-Making under Trump: Shared Aspirations for Moral Realignment as Mechanisms of Moral Boundary Work

• In Event: 50806 - The Role of Culture, Institutions, and Power in Moral Action

Abstract

The Trump administration introduced substantial changes to U.S. asylum policy. This paper draws on interviews with U.S. asylum officers who felt that implementing the new policies conflicted with their service missions. I examine how these officers sought to realign their actions and values, thus redrawing the moral boundaries of their professional community. My interviews reveal how officers’ relative ability to form with their peers a shared experience of crisis and aspiration for moral realignment significantly shaped their boundary strategies. Existing studies do not attend to this interactive dimension of moral boundary work. I outline a theoretical framework that captures how exchanges among members of a shared professional community inform bureaucrats’ efforts to resolve ruptures in their institutional identification. This undertheorized dimension of worker-to-worker interactions as a mechanism of moral boundary work advances understandings of the interrelations between morality and organizational practice in times of crisis and paradigmatic policy change.

Author

• Talia Shiff, Tel-Aviv University