Missing in Action: Practice, Paralegality, and the Nature of Immigration Enforcement

Valdez, Inés; Coleman, Mat; Akbar, Amna A.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2881944

Cited by 7 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…This essay calls for researchers to delve deeper into the work lives of contemporary immigration agents. I echo others who have called for comparative (Dauvergne, Ellermann, & Gravelle 2012), bottom-up (Armenta & Alvarez, 2017), and practice-based analyses of local immigration enforcement processes (Valdez, Coleman, & Akbar, 2017). Yet I emphasize the need for a cultural sociology of immigration control 1 work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Toward a Cultural Sociology of Immigration Control: A Call for Research

Vega

2019

American Behavioral Scientist

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The criminalization of immigration has garnered a great deal of attention in the United States and abroad. Most research, however, examines the political and legal shifts that produced the contemporary system, as well as the implications of these shifts for immigrant communities. The cultural changes that have occurred for frontline immigration agents as an occupational group have not received the scrutiny they deserve. I argue that the control culture of immigration enforcers is a critical mechanism that stifles the viability of humanitarian-minded legal reforms in the U.S. immigration system. I call for a cultural sociology of immigration control work, with an emphasis on the perceptions, skills, and normative valuations of frontline immigration enforcers, and identify three specific areas for future research: (1) studying immigration enforcers as social control agents, (2) expanding analyses of immigration implementation beyond discretionary decision-making, and (3) disrupting the tendency to take the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis in migration studies. By pursuing this agenda on immigration agents’ work lives, we will better understand the rationalities that underlie their behaviors and shape immigration law in action.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Toward a Cultural Sociology of Immigration Control: A Call for Research

Vega

2019

American Behavioral Scientist

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“…Indeed, building on Neocleous and Wagner, we might say that from a legislative standpoint the police are not simply enacting the law discretionarily but are "out in front of the law" and that legislation (policy, law, etc. ), although masquerading as the fount of police practice, is effectively caught in the bind of always codifying and justifying police practices, past tense (Valdez et al, 2017). In this sense, the law "cold cases" actually existing police power.…”

Section: Studying the Police And Racial Profilingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The growth of §287(g) was decisively shaped by Attorney General Ashcroft’s contentious exploration, made public in 2005, about whether or not state and local police had the “inherent authority” to police immigration violations, absent formal delegation through programs such as §287(g) (Office of Legal Counsel, 2002). Ultimately, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shied away from this argument, but the upshot was that §287(g) was widely normalized, and embraced, as a more modest and legally less suspect way to get state and local police involved in immigration enforcement (see overview in Valdez, Coleman, & Akbar, 2017). By 2007, §287(g) had spread across the U.S. south and southeast and morphed into an expansive suite of state and local policing practices aimed at general immigration violations: Through the so-called “task force” version of §287(g), state and local police were empowered to ask about immigration status during routine policing, and without making an arrest on criminal grounds; and through the “jail model” version of the program, state and local police were tasked with interviewing individuals booked into custody about their immigration status, which could include a so-called “immigration alien query,” via telephone.…”

Section: §287(g) and Secure Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A key assumption in much of the literature is that police power is not legislative; rather, policing, as a practice, responds to legislation, policy, or some other legal text. We draw this language—legislative versus nonlegislative approaches to the police—from Derrida’s (1989) discussion of law and violence, reviewed in Valdez et al (2017). Tackling the police from a nonlegislative standpoint is to insist on the police as responsive to—or more strongly, hemmed in by—official police policies, guidelines, and professional modes of conduct.…”

Section: Studying the Police And Racial Profilingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking the “Gold Standard” of Racial Profiling: §287(g), Secure Communities and Racially Discrepant Police Power

Coleman

Kocher

2019

American Behavioral Scientist

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In this article, we explore methodological difficulties related to proving racial profiling, specifically in the context of §287(g) and Secure Communities enforcement. How it is that critical immigration researchers understand racial profiling as the object of their research, and how might they go about substantiating racial profiling in the field? Can racial profiling be made a straightforward object of problematization and, if not, why? We are particularly interested in how racial profiling can be so self-evidently at the core of programs like §287(g) and Secure Communities and yet how racialized law enforcement decisions and tactics are so often inscrutable—and difficult to prove—in the context of routine police work. Building on original fieldwork findings and data on roadblocks by §287(g) and Secure Communities agencies in central North Carolina, we dissect the differences between racially discrepant police work and racial profiling, and argue that chasing the “gold standard” of racial profiling risks leaving racially discrepant policing on the table as an apparently unproblematic, and perhaps even defensible, outcome of policing. As such, we argue that critical scholars should leave aside the problem of proving racial profiling and instead refocus on the problem of racially discrepant policing.

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“…As in other fields of migration control, however, border-control practice never exactly mirrors the law, causing a ‘gap’ and incoherence between policy goals and their implementation (Ellermann 2009 ; Eule et al 2019 ; Hollifield et al 2014 ). Going beyond an analysis of policies and laws, this article looks at how border guards control border-crossers and the border itself via concrete, everyday practices (see Côté-Boucher et al 2014 ; Lipsky 2010 ; Loftus 2015 ; Pallister-Wilkins 2015 ; Valdez et al 2017 ). Its focus is how border guards, as street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010 ) acting within a state organisation (the Swiss Border Guard [SBG]), put into practice its rules and mission and co-constitute the organisation (Edelman and Suchman 1997 ; Ortmann et al 2000 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shaping migration at the border: the entangled rationalities of border control practices

Achermann

2021

CMS

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This article analyses how border guards as members of a state organisation shape the movement of non-nationals into the territory of a nation state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the Swiss Border Guard (SBG), it explores the rationalities—understood as stabilised ways of reasoning and acting—that characterise practices within this state organisation. Combining organisational and structuration theory with a street-level bureaucracy perspective allows for a differentiated analysis of the various facets of border guards’ everyday work. Four rationalities of border-control practices are identified and compared: security, humanitarian, cost-calculation, and pragmatic rationality. I argue that, by considering both the specific goals and imperatives of border control and the characteristics of street-level bureaucrats acting within a state organisation, these entangled logics explain the complex and incoherent social reality of border control. More generally, the results contribute to organisational theory by pointing to the importance of taking into account that multiple entangled rationalities structure the practices of an organisation’s members.

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Missing in Action: Practice, Paralegality, and the Nature of Immigration Enforcement

Cited by 7 publications

References 60 publications

Toward a Cultural Sociology of Immigration Control: A Call for Research

Toward a Cultural Sociology of Immigration Control: A Call for Research

Rethinking the “Gold Standard” of Racial Profiling: §287(g), Secure Communities and Racially Discrepant Police Power

Shaping migration at the border: the entangled rationalities of border control practices

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