Fear, Surveillance, and Resistance: Navigating the Spaces of Immigration Enforcement

• In Event: The Moral Worlds of Immigration Bureaucrats II

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of violence as a fundamental locality within immigration systems, shaped by racial state theory and legal-spatial violence. Immigration policies function as tools of exclusion and control, reinforcing racial hierarchies through border enforcement, detention centres, and internalized surveillance. The discussion situates legal violence within broader geographies of harm, illustrating how immigration law not only governs migrants’ lives but actively produces violence through spatial and legal mechanisms. By examining key scholarly contributions, including theories of legal violence and structural violence (Galtung, 1969), this chapter demonstrates how immigration laws embed racialized exclusion into national and transnational governance frameworks. The concept of legal-spatial violence is introduced to highlight how forced migrants experience a paradox of mobility and immobility, subjected to bordering practices that criminalize their existence. Narratives from asylum seekers and immigration legal practitioners (ILPs) from organisations in Glasgow, United Kingdom and New York, USA further illustrate the lived realities of these policies, showing how state violence is both physical and psychological.The paper also examines the critical role of immigration legal practitioners (ILPs) as they navigate a system designed to exclude, detain, and deport. While ILPs serve as advocates, intermediaries, and challengers of legal violence, they too are embedded in restrictive bureaucratic frameworks that often limit their ability to secure justice for their clients. The vicarious trauma and emotional labour associated with this work highlight the broader toll that systemic violence imposes—not just on migrants, but on those working within legal advocacy. By exposing the contradictions, ethical dilemmas, and resistance strategies of ILPs, this paper underscores their dual role as both enforcers and disruptors of immigration law.
Ultimately, this paper argues that violence within immigration systems is not incidental but central to the racial state, necessitating systemic change to challenge exclusionary policies and advance justice for migrants.

Author

• Leslie Stephanie Molina, University of Glasgow