Moral bureaucracies: Tensions and contradictions in asylum work

• In Event: The Moral Worlds of Immigration Bureaucrats I

Abstract

This paper explores the tensions and contradictions in asylum work. Drawing on ethnographic data from two asylum offices in England which includes observations of asylum screenings and interviews with asylum officers and applicants, I explore how frontline staff perceive their role. They portray themselves as bureaucrats devoid of any agency and insist on a depersonalized ideal of professionalism (detached, objective, impartial) which, they claim, they rigidly follow. Yet, their everyday encounters with ‘clients’ reveal profound moral and emotional struggles to come to terms with these professional expectations. I locate these struggles within competing institutional norms and officers’ personal and professional trajectories. In so doing, the paper foregrounds moral sentiments as a critical aspect of state power and in its unstable, open-ended, and fluid operation.

Author

• Ana Aliverti, University of Warwick