The Moral Worlds of Immigration Bureaucrats I

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

Understanding the global migration control apparatus means also trying to unravel the perspectives and experiences of those working within these bureaucratic systems. While much of the analysis on these systems of control assume them as monolithic, empirical studies with them suggest a rather more fragmented field. Given the political sensibility and ethical controversies around migration control, it is not surprising that many immigration staff express diverse and contradictory perspectives and experiences of what is like to do their work.
While much has been written about the professional culture of criminal justice workers, including immigration control staff, less attention has been paid to these workers’ moral worlds, understood as the norms and values that shape their worldviews, practical reasoning and actions.
In these panel sessions, we are are exploring these moral worlds to better understand the everyday work of these officers and explore critiques from within. We welcome papers that deal with: methodological insights on exploring this aspect of immigration bureaucracies, theoretical and empirical perspectives on morality and immigration labour, the affective dimension of immigration law implementation, and comparative analysis of the moral worlds of immigration control workers.

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Crime Control and the Immigration System (Immigration, Crime and Citizenship WG)

Chair

• Irene Vega, UC Irvine

Individual Presentations

• Punitive Subjectivities and Emotions in Immigration Detention in Mexico - Alethia Fernández de la Reguera, Institute of Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico

• Training morality: Shaping Values in Border Policing? - Amalia Campos Delgado, Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law & Society, Leiden University; Maartje van der Woude, Professor of Law and Society, Universiteit Leiden

• Moral bureaucracies: Tensions and contradictions in asylum work - Ana Aliverti, University of Warwick