scholarly journals Encounters of Despair: Street-Level Bureaucrat and Migrant Interactions in Sweden and Switzerland

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Borrelli
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

Encounters between street-level bureaucrats and the so-called “client of the state” – here the migrant individual with precarious legal status – are characterized by great power imbalances. The dependency relationships that emerge out of public administrative encounters need to be understood as spaces of continuous asymmetrical negotiations. Emotions play a crucial role, not only as a translation of how migrants and bureaucrats mutually shape, contest, and reproduce migration control, but also as a strategic component and a tool for negotiation. Supported by ethnographic data from a Swiss Cantonal Migration Office and a Swedish Border Police Unit, collected between 2016 and 2017, I argue that emotions interweave all migrant-bureaucrat interactions. Their analysis discloses not only the emotional labour of migration enforcement, but also how it is translated into bureaucratically enacted practices, which include physical force, vocal exchanges, documents and spatial means, leading to what Walters (2006) coined “political economies of violence” (438).

scholarly journals Policy Dilemmas of Migration Control: Liberal Democracies and Migrants with Precarious Legal Status

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Caroline Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Immigration Policies ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

This dissertation investigates salient policy dilemmas of migration control in liberal democracies, thereby offering novel perspectives on the study of immigration policies in political science and beyond.

scholarly journals Illegalisation, Masculinity and Intimacy

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 121-126
Author(s):  
Anna Wyss
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Sexual Assaults ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
New Year’S Eve ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

The «Event Köln» (Dietze 2016) has shown how public images of migrant men as being potentially dangerous to women can be exploited for justifying more restrictive migration control. The reported sexual assaults of women by migrant men from North Africa in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 were followed by a moral panic and political demands to expel «those who were believed to endanger post-feminist Germany» (Boulila et al. 2017: 286). This event forms part of a series of other instances in which the supposed protection of women has served nationalist agendas in order to assert more restrictive policies. Such racialised and highly gendered public images – mostly referring to men of a Muslim and / or African background – are mirrored in the narratives and experiences of male migrants with precarious legal status.

scholarly journals Using Ignorance as (Un)Conscious Bureaucratic Strategy

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Borrelli
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Member States ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Street Level Bureaucrats ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

Street-level bureaucrats working in the field of migration enforcement have the uneasy task of finding irregularised migrants and processing their cases – often until deportation. As the encounters are unforeseeable and characterised by tension and emotions, bureaucrats develop practices and strategies, which help them to manage the often very personal encounters. Besides the frequently debated strategies summarised under the term ‘copying mechanisms’ and the problem of ‘dirty’ or many hands, ignorance as a tactic in the daily work of bureaucrats has not been studied to a sufficient extent. This work looks at how ignorance, including deliberate not-knowing or blinding out, as well as undeliberate partial-knowing or being kept ignorant, is used in public administration, through multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork in migration offices and border police/guard offices of three Schengen Member States: Sweden, Switzerland and Latvia. It distinguishes between structural and individual ignorance, which both have the ability to limit migrant’s agency. Further, by analysing their intertwined relation, this article furthers our understanding of how uncertainty and a lack of accountability become results of everyday bureaucratic encounters. Ignorance thus obscures state practices, subjecting migrants with precarious legal status to structural violence.

Forging a New Allegiance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
Early American ◽  
American States ◽  
Legal Frameworks ◽  
Domestic Law

During the Revolutionary War, the British were not the only side that had to work through difficult questions surrounding the legal status of prisoners. The American states faced the very same questions during the war when detaining British soldiers and the disaffected “Loyalists” among their ranks. In constructing new legal frameworks to govern these matters, the states drew heavily on the English model that had governed before the war and under which so many of their legal elite had trained. This chapter discusses the concept of allegiance, dividing those falling “within protection” and those outside of it, and how it played a crucial role in triggering the application of domestic law. This chapter also chronicles the story of the long-standing struggle of the states to claim the English Habeas Corpus Act’s protections for themselves, while highlighting the pervasive influence of the Act—including especially its seventh section—on early American habeas jurisprudence.

scholarly journals Legal Status of the Immigration Bureau of Japan

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. V. Karpova ◽  
K. A. Karpov
Keyword(s):  
State Policy ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The State ◽  
Japanese Government ◽  
State Funding ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
History Of

The paper is aimed at studying the features of the migration legislation of Japan and the study of the legal status of the immigration bureau of this state. Japan is a country that has passed a special path of historical development. In many ways, this specificity was due to the state policy of isolationism. The existing cultural traditions largely determine the attitude of the Japanese government to immigration. The paper studies the history of the formation of migration control authorities of the state in question, the peculiarities of the legal status of the Immigration Bureau of the Ministry of Justice of Japan and its structure, analyzes the powers of the Immigration Bureau employees. The paper also provides information on the size of the Immigration Bureau and state funding of the activities of this body.

scholarly journals Pursuing permanence: former international students’ trajectories to permanent residency in Canada

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca Gomez
Keyword(s):  
International Students ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Structuration Theory ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Permanent Residence ◽  
Anthony Giddens ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Permanent Residency ◽  
And Control

This exploratory study investigates former international students’ experiences pursuing permanent status with the use of primary data from interviews with five individuals. Guided by the question, “what characterizes former international students’ trajectories to permanent residence” and based on the understanding that discourses of exclusion and control inform immigration policies today (Fobear, 2014), personal experiences are explored as realities of temporariness in which subjects are contained by the following forms of regulation: time limits, employment specificity, and temporary legal status. Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory is employed to showcase participants as “knowledgeable” (Sewell, 1992:4) and reflexive agents (Turner, 1986); how they persevere and negotiate their way to permanent residence by enacting creative strategies and enduring the emotional labour that characterize their search for and securing of ‘skilled’ employment while mitigating the immediate need for income, in reframing their mindsets and in their reflections upon the meaning of their pursuits for permanence.

scholarly journals ‘If you don’t have documents or a legal procedure, you are out!’ Making humanitarian organizations partner in migration control

2020 ◽  
pp. 147737082093207
Author(s):  
Mieke Kox ◽  
Richard Staring
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Control Policies ◽  
Migration Policies ◽  
Legal Procedure ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Humanitarian Organizations ◽  
Support Organizations ◽  
Migration Control

The paradoxical merger of humanitarian care and securitization imperatives can be seen not only at external and externalized borders, but also at the internal borders in the Netherlands. Here, humanitarian organizations that sprang up to support migrants without a legal status in response to – and given their disagreement with – the state’s exclusionary migration policies have become involved in migration control. During a gradual and subtle responsibilization process, the Dutch authorities have used specific measures and redirected monetary flows in order to incorporate these organizations into its broader migration control policies. This has resulted in a decrease in the number of support organizations for unauthorized migrants, a reduction in their independence and autonomy, and an increased focus on selection and return. Ethnographic fieldwork amongst unauthorized migrants illustrates the consequences of this exclusionary control. These migrants experience exclusion, selection and enforcement by humanitarian organizations and doubt the trustworthiness of these organizations. This development seems to fit in with the broader trend of European states disarming humanitarian organizations for unauthorized migrants by either responsibilizing or criminalizing them. However, these strategies are not without consequences because they run the risk that unauthorized migrants will further withdraw and turn away from this type of assistance altogether. We use both a humanitarian and a pragmatic perspective to argue that it would make sense for states either to allow organizations to continue their – uncompromised and unconditional – support for unauthorized migrants or to adapt their migration policies in such a way that humanitarian support becomes redundant.

Networks of Resilience: Legal Precarity and Transborder Citizenship among the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Indrė Balčaitė
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Karen Refugees ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

AbstractThis study probes the relationship between legal precarity and transborder citizenship through the case of the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand. Collected through ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, interconnected individual life stories evolving across the Myanmar-Thailand border allow the critical interrogation of the political and legal categories of ‘migrancy’, ‘refugeeness’, and ‘citizenship’, teasing out their blurry boundaries in migrants’ experience. Following the recent critical research in legal ethnography, this study demonstrates that legal precarity is not simply an antithesis to citizenship. The social and legal dimensions of citizenship may diverge, creating in-between areas of not-yet-full-citizenship with varying levels of heft (Macklin 2007). The article consists of three parts. First, it offers a theoretical framework to reconcile the Karen legal precarity (even de facto statelessness) and citizenship, even on both sides of the border (legally impossible). Second, it presents the three groups of Karen in Thailand, produced by the interaction of three major waves of Karen eastward migration and tightening Thai citizenship and migration regulations: Thai Karen, refugees, and migrant workers. All three face varying levels of legal precarity of temporary status without full citizenship. However, the last part demonstrates the intertwined nature of those groups. A grassroots transborder perspective reveals the resilience of the Karen networks when pooling together resources of the hubs established on Thai soil by the three waves. Even the most recent arrivals in Thailand use those resources to move from one precarious legal status to another and even to clandestinely obtain citizenship.

scholarly journals Serial Killers & Their Easy Prey

Contexts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jooyoung Lee ◽  
Sasha Reid
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Vulnerable Populations ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Serial Killers ◽  
Serial Homicide ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Precarious Legal Status

How do serial killers get away with murder? For years, law enforcement, true crime writers, and journalists have portrayed serial killers as criminal masterminds. But, a closer look at serial homicide cases reveals a different story: Serial killers are opportunists who target marginalized and vulnerable populations. Specifically, they target street sex workers, who become “easy prey” because of their precarious legal status.

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