“It’s not my job to believe or not to believe. My job is to process”: Exploring the moral worlds of the British ‘Small Boat Operational Command’

• In Event: The Moral Worlds of Immigration Bureaucrats II

Abstract

Images of ‘small boats’ arriving irregularly to the shores of the UK have dominated British news cycles since late 2018, when the number of people doing so began to increase. In response, successive governments have introduced increasingly hostile legislation and policy measures in attempt to ‘deter’ people from making such crossings. This paper considers what can be learnt about the state and its borders from the perspectives of those tasked with everyday borderwork on the South Coast of England. I examine the ‘moral worlds’ of Border Force officers employed in the ‘Small Boats Operational Command’ through 21 interviews and 50 hours of ethnographic observation completed over the summer of 2023. Here, I attempted to understand how officers understood the roles of ‘care’ and ‘control’ in their work. I discuss how, while many officers articulated their job as to ‘care’ for people arriving, such moral demands were usually limited to the humanitarian framing and acts of ‘search and rescue’. Drawing on literature on ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2012), including at borders (Walters 2010), I unpack how, and offer explanations for why, officers often made claims to neutrality (“we’re neutral, we’re here to safeguard people”) while subjecting them to processes of border control. Through their narratives, I discuss how saving life and border security were understood, not as conflicting, but as mutually achievable goals. I reflect on how interactions between people arriving and officers were mediated by bureaucratic practices, and finally, on the implications in terms of the treatment of people arriving.

Author

• Victoria Taylor, University of Oxford