Affective control: the emotional life of (en)forcing mobility control in Europe

ABSTRACT

Current outcomes of immigration enforcement policies and apparatuses call for rethinking the ethics behind our understanding of community belonging, human rights and just society. The ethics at work are often presented as emotions creating particular affective atmosphere that permit the ongoing implementation of enforcing migration. This Special Issue tackles emotions as processes of organizing that are mobilized in support of certain ethics. In the context of immigration enforcement, these emotions are not self-explanatory, but they can justify the potential for violence and even deem it necessary. The emotions or affects of enforcers (as opposed to migrants) have been less addressed, and this Special Issue aims to be a novel collection. The articles pay particular attention to racism and to the understanding of institutional racism within state structures. They reveal the ways in which emotions are instrumental to the operations of state bureaucracy within the repressive migration apparatus and point to the ethics that allows individuals to conform state structures of oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• migration enforcement
• ethics
• racism
• borders
• emotions

Emotions have been empirically explored and theorized surprisingly infrequently in migration and borders studies. In the migration field, emotions have important empirical consequences, yet, if they are considered at all they are regarded as unimportant side effects of immigration bureaucracies. What scholarly work there is on immigration enforcement and emotions has focused on migrants and their responses to the structural violence of the migration apparatus, both structural and spectacular (Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015, Khosravi 2017). In contrast, in this Special Issue we interrogate how enforcers manage, accommodate or suppress feelings stirred while at work surveilling, controlling and recording migrants and enforcing deportations. Work on the emotions of enforcers and their affective context is very much an emerging field, and this Special Issue is the first such collection.

Europe is strongly imagined, by Europeans and non-Europeans alike, as a bastion of human rights and a space of respect for human dignity. Yet the European Union is also depicted as Fortress Europe walled against non-European outsiders, its external borders sites of death, surveillance and misery for would-be entrants. Both these imaginaries overlook how the European space is crisscrossed with borders. Identity documents are checked not only at the edges of territories but also within them. Thus, the emotions explored in this Special Issue are not only those of enforcers at the borders, such as immigration officers, but also of police, social or legal workers and court officials.

Civil servants who conduct and order checks and enforcement may face emotional struggles (Graham 2002, Eggebø 2013, Kalir 2019) including their feelings of complicity and belonging while policing migration (Parmar 2018). These emotions can play a critical role in shaping their behaviour. Scholarship on state organization has examined state workings and principles at the institutional level, focusing on people who implement policies, make sense of their role and work and who operate discretion to negotiate their relationships with the state and with the citizenry they serve. Herzfeld, for example, researched civil servants to explain human compliance with implementing appalling laws and how, under certain circumstances, anybody can consent to ‘the humiliation of others’ (1993, 13). He explained how the social production of indifference is a structural mechanism that reproduces nation-state modernization (Herzfeld 1993). Others have observed conflicts of interest between the ethical beliefs of some police officers and the laws they are supposed to implement. Papazoglou et al. (2020) for example have explored the issues that arise when officers cannot address ethical dilemmas because they are not permitted to discuss the ethical legitimacy or logic of laws they are required to enforce. At the same time, the affective turn in social sciences has fundamentally shifted how we analyse the emotional dimensions of everyday life (Clough and Halley 2007, Gregg and Seigworth 2010), and the organizational perspective on affects (Fineman 2000, 2008, Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015), which reveals how emotions are negotiated, exhibited, and manoeuvred at the workplace, and moral emotions, driven by concern towards others rather than personal interest (Lindebaum et al. 2017).

Ethnographies of public services are unusual in their engagement with the emotions experienced in bureaucracies. These illustrate the specificity of different domains of governing through public institutions. They include in-depth analyses of bureaucracies of immigration and law enforcement work (Heyman 1995, Hoag 2010, Eggebø 2013), critical analyses of the health system (Savage 2006), education (Honig 2006, Murphy 2009, Grissom et al. 2015), and social services (Dubois 2009). Bakker and Heuven’s (2006) study of civil servants working for the ‘left hand’ and the ‘right hand’ of the state is unusual in its adoption of a comparative approach, exploring and comparing how affects and emotions are shaped in healthcare and the police. This literature has been complemented by critical management studies’ engagement with issues of change and identity, thereby consolidating research on the affective nature of human relations in organizations, including the contribution of ethnography to organization studies and public management (van Maanen 1979, Bernstein and Mertz 2011, Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014).

Since Hannah Arendt (1963) shifted morality from emotions (hatred) to lack of (political, moral) thinking, scholars have struggled to analyse the impact of organizational rules on personal ethics (Höpfl and Linstead 1997, Lurie 2004, Fotaki et al. 2017, Greenbaum et al. 2020). Some scholars distinguish between affect and emotion, analysing affect as a feature of consciousness that can only sometimes be captured by language and taking bodily experience as key to affective life. Others point to affect as having a collective element informed by ‘what happens to the social groups to which [people] belong and/or identify with’ (Bericat 2016, 494). Affect thus reflects and shapes affective structures (Bericat 2016), such as Gilroy’s (2005) post-imperial melancholia. Considering emotions as collective affects (Ahmed 2014) scholars also try to explain the resulting climate or atmosphere in organizational settings (Anderson 2010, Julmi 2017, Czarniawska 2018), or in political contexts (Berlant 2020, D’Aoust 2014, Sauer and Penz 2017). Importantly, affect and emotion are often used interchangeably (Wetherell 2012, Ahmed 2014, Åhäll 2018). We, too, are sceptical about a sharp division between feeling, affect and emotion. Rather than polishing definitions of emotions, affect and feelings (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987) we follow Sara Ahmed’s 2014 advice to look at what affects do. Our interest is in understanding the consequences of emotions manifest in contexts where ethics, affect and organizational structures overlap. We consider affective atmosphere, such as inter-organizational and inter-personal affective experiences, as a valuable way to engage with questions regarding the ethical understandings of people working in organizations implementing migration controls.

Emotions as collective communities of feeling (Berezin 2002) are part of politics (Ost 2004). More particularly in our case, nationalism encompasses a wide spectrum of, often contradictory, emotions. While imagined as the provenance of the far right, or of progressive national liberation struggles, everyday nationalism is also integrated into the affective landscape of liberal democracies (Billig 1995). Importantly too, nation and race are deeply imbricated. To legitimize immigration controls it is critical that liberal democratic states can claim that they are not racist, but they are mobilized to protect the nation and national values. In that sense at least, not only is it legitimate that immigration controls are nationalist, but nationalism goes to the heart of their raisons d’être as they sanction, filter and select those who belong to the nation state and those who do not. The fact that enforcement practices often undermine some of the liberal ideals associated with the nation including through exposing the structuring role of race leads Herzfeld to argue that a theodicy is characteristic of European political identities (indeed arguably of national identities more generally). Theodicy is used to describe theological arguments that account for a just god despite the existence of evil. The commitment to the ideal of the nation is maintained, despite the evils committed in its name, and through a sense of its transcendent purpose ‘the citizens of these states are able to excuse acts of repression and accept daily bureaucratic indifference by maintaining a continuous belief in the transcendental purpose of their nation state’ (Barnett 2009, 124).

Bureaucracies are infused with affects and produce particular affective structures, but the affective dimension of state organization has been relatively under-studied in comparison to dimensions such as redistribution or social justice. This affective dimension has primarily been analysed at the bureaucratic interface between ordinary citizens and civil servants – street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980). This work is very relevant to immigration enforcement as emotions are instrumental to the operations of state bureaucracy within a repressive migration apparatus, particularly as emotions experienced in the daily labour of civil servants have tended to be described in cultural terms, attributed to national frameworks or group behaviour. In the immigration context, collective feelings help shape senses of belonging (patriotism, loyalty, commitment). They can facilitate exclusionary practices based on repulsive affects (hostility, disgust, hatred) and the in-group/out-group dynamics (resistance, solidarity) are mobilized towards effective migration control. We call the emotions experienced in this context ethical emotions. We use this term for specific affective states that emerge where personal views of the world, and organizational and social structures are in tension. We use it to capture how these emotions both embed and challenge certain ethical frameworks, (dis)enabling individual’s negotiation of the personal and the institutional. This term is not meant to suggest that these emotions are in themselves good or bad: pride can help minority groups affirm and claim social rights but can also serve as a call to fascism. Rather it is meant to point to the ways that emotions enable actors to make or dispute the ethical sense of their activities and thus it indicates the relevance of emotions to their practice. When bureaucrats distinguish between degrees of ‘deservingness’ to qualify migrants for asylum, they act affectively according to their moral compass (with compassion, empathy, or out of frustration, etc.). We are interested in how regulators can be caught between personal ethics (here is a human) and institutionally endorsed ethical claims (here are illegal immigrants). Even those who can make sense of their work may emotionally struggle, as immigration and asylum policies expose tensions inherent between republican principles, liberal rights claims and national sovereignty (Anderson 2013). Under the present constellation of politically induced fear of migrants, the Special Issue tackles emotions as processes of organizing that are mobilized in support of certain ethics. Expressed ethical emotions are an ideal site to study how state violence is enforced and contested in the work of the wide range of institutions with responsibilities for managing migration. We centralize ethical emotions to explore what the emotional responses to immigration controls tell us about the nature of those controls and the contexts within which they operate.

Bureaucratic work and bureaucracies are much larger than state-works (Graeber 2012), and the distinction between state and non-state actors is increasingly blurred. It is no longer only immigration officials who must manage emotional responses to immigration processes, but a wide range of state and non-state stakeholders. Immigration checks are not only conducted by immigration enforcement officers but by citizens, often as part of their day-to-day employment duties. Importantly then, we also attend to the growing numbers of non-state actors who are required to conduct state enforcement including immigration surveillance and reporting (Walsh 2019). This includes NGOs as well as private companies, as implementing immigration policies is a specific collaborative field of state and non-state organizations (Kalir and Wissink 2016). This is particularly developed in the UK’s hostile environment policies, which require not only employers but universities, schools, landlords, banks, health service employees and others to check documents and share information with immigration officials. The conscription of social actors into immigration policing is expanding elsewhere and so too are the numbers of organizations and individuals tasked with checking identity and status.

We therefore focus on state institutions and non-state agencies that work together to surveil and police the mobility of undesired subjects. This does not mean conflating the two. The ethical values promoted by private companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and state institutions differ significantly, at least on paper. Companies and NGOs can claim to be apolitical, but governments cannot. Moreover, organizational designs and institutional cultures can facilitate or restrict frontline workers’ and managers’ practices of discretion/discrimination. Management matters: it can delineate individual’s room for manoeuvre regarding particular cases; it can encourage or discourage collaboration between those differently positioned in the hierarchy; and it can enable or restrict sharing of personal values between enforcers.

There are two contemporary developments that frame the context in which this Special Issue addresses emotions and affects. The first is the global social movement for Black Lives beyond Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the impetus given to struggles, conversations and activism contesting structural racism in state organizations including the police and immigration policies. Scholars, activists and scholar activists have been developing work that explores the relation between migration, race and enforcement (Lentin 2018; Anderson 2017; Bhattacharya 2018; de Noronha, 2020; Yuval Davis et al. 2019; Vrăbiescu 2021; El-Enany 2020; Sharma 2020; work by Statewatch and work showcased by the Institute of Race Relations¹ for example) but this has not engaged with the role of emotions and affect. Intra-/inter-group socialization often impacts on the implementation of regulations and policies by allowing workers to perform their job without thinking and previous work has examined this as a component of the reproduction of institutional racism (Heyman 1995), as well as the gendered dimension of state institutions (Acker 1992, Connell 2006). We build on this, analysing how the affective dimensions of institutional organizations manifest as humiliation or frustration enable both the effective implementation of enforcement mechanisms and the dismissal of accusations of racism or sexism.

Using the lens of affect and emotions to bring together the fields of migration on the one hand and race and ethnic studies on the other the Special Issue contributes to the literature on institutional racism in Europe (Brennan, 2017, Lentin 2018) and the ways in which ethical emotions support racism. Thus, it moves away from the colour-blind human rights approach that, with few notable exceptions, has tended to characterize even critical European migration scholarship. It explores managing emotions in the context of institutional racism and patriarchy in state organizations and their proxies (Vrăbiescu 2020), and how this is mobilized and expressed through racialized/nationalized emotions, as well as emotions stirred by frictions between personal ethics and the ethics of the institutions people represent. These emotions are not self-explanatory, but they can justify violence and even deem it necessary. They are expressions of ethical values at work in immigration bureaucracies and indicate how policies make their way into organizations and the body of society. Through problematizing the ethical emotions in immigration enforcement, this Special Issue also engages in the turn to care as a response to the populist trend and to the current legitimation of sexist and racist discourses (Bourgault and Robinson 2020).

The second development is the COVID-19 epidemic. This enabled European states to invoke national protection measures as motivating movement restrictions within states and across state borders, including borders between European Union member states. The affects of the pandemic were and continue to be mobilized to limit civil rights and enforce border security in the name of health protection at the same time as claiming that we’re all in it together. These restrictions belong to the emerging pattern of governing migration through crisis management that typically mobilizes disaster nationalism – as is evidenced at the European level in the 2015 so-called refugee crisis and more recently at the national level in e.g. the state of emergency declared by Poland on the Belarus border.

This Special Issue examines emotions within bureaucracies of migration management. It explores questions like: What emotions are experienced during the daily work of migration enforcement? When and how do state officials erase emotions and claim rationality? How does the state immigration organizational structure, classification and ideology cultivate or repress certain emotions? What kind of mobility legal-politico constellations trigger ethical emotions? What is the relevance of race and gender in the experience of ethical emotions? The Special Issue investigates what emotional responses to immigration controls tell us about the nature of those controls, the contexts in which they operate and the impacts that they have on citizens. We focus on the civil servants, police officers and members of the public working together to detect, identify, protect and prosecute illegalized mobile subjects. Besides exploring law enforcement and immigration agents’ feelings about their practices, contributions interrogate the emotions of social workers, teachers, healthcare professionals and others who are charged with implementing immigration rules. The seven articles address state bureaucracies and their proxies in the UK, Spain, France, Greece, Switzerland and Germany.

Alpa Parmar’s article examines how street-level bureaucrats feel race. Her article contributes to mapping the racial economy of emotions and highlights the significance of the emotions that race and racism engender, a recently reinvigorated scholarly interest (Bonilla-Silva, 2019). Taking the cue to feel race and drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews and the analysis of legal tribunal hearings she explores the emotive register of police officers and criminal case workers whilst performing their occupational roles. She captures how their feelings of power, pleasure, complicity, and disavowal are framed by and suffused with race. The complexity and contradictions of these emotions are further exposed in relation to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people in police and migration control-related roles who are often complicit in the production of neo-imperial racial hierarchies in Britain (Back, Sinha, and Bryan 2012).

Katerina Rozakou provokes us to reflect on ambiguous feelings of police officers in charge of guarding, surveilling and deporting migrants from Greece. They are notorious for their anti-migrant, racist attitudes and the conditions in the country’s migrant detention centres are infamously poor. At the same time as demonstrating state abandonment in the Greek migrant detention regime, Rozakou explores officers’ relations with and care towards migrants in registration and pre-removal detention centres. The culturally significant sentiment of filotimo (love of honour), she argues, makes for apparent contradictions in the relations between officers and migrants. Filotimo speaks to a sense of national pride and honour that requires police officers perform care for the migrants, and their tasks in general. However, instead of encouraging acceptance of the Other, and questioning the harshness of the migration regime, its appeal to Greekness means filotimo ultimately consolidates nationalism and allows the abandonment of illegalized – and often racialized – migrants by the state.

Lisa Marie Borrelli problematizes the organizational emotions of institutions designed to manage welfare and migration control. She takes a close look at how street-level bureaucrats feel each other, the state and its policies in order to perform their role in immigration enforcement. Ethics influence practices within the organizations and communication between different types of organizations but the concern to ensure the better good is secured for the state rather than for migrants. For example, emotions in social services change their moral meaning: compassion becomes do-gooder, legitimizing the hierarchy which makes migration offices the ultimate decision-makers. When emotions are articulated in migration offices, they reflect state values and become moral, concerned with the wider good and the wellbeing of the state.

Corina Tulbure’s analysis of the Barcelona’s internal borders shows how bureaucratic processes for migrants’ social inclusion divide potential clients between those who ‘deserve’ to access rights and those who do not. Bordering practices are enacted by official rules and regulations and by the affective struggles of bureaucrats. She explains how policies and programmes developed for the ‘inclusion’ of destitute migrants take a high emotional toll on social workers. Often, they become annoyed by some migrants’ alleged lack of response, wrong behaviour, or high risk. Tulbure argues that this annoyance has the potential to show how resourceful emotions end up justifying exclusion in what is recognized as a violent and discriminatory system of selecting social beneficiaries.

Melanie Griffiths identifies ‘The Emotional Economy of Immigration Controls’ as the emotional register deployed in immigration control institutions in Britain. She shows how people who work to enforce migration use specific emotions to dehumanize, vilify and dismiss. She explores the impact and role of this emotional economy, at individual and systemic levels, analysing how emotions contribute to ‘creating persons and boundaries, processes of subjectification and the materialization of the political’. She argues that within the emotional economy of the immigration control apparatus, immigration practitioners maintain ‘ethical distance’ and emotional dis-connection with migrants. Moreover, Griffiths claims ‘immigration policy design and deployment … weaponizing affects is a constitutive feature, not an accident, of the immigration system’. Feelings and affects are embedded in immigration legislation, work-cultures and practice. The violent, abject and negative emotionality imagined as inherent to the ‘other’ is in fact a projection of one’s emotional state and reflects power hierarchies within the immigration system.

Aino Korvensyrjä takes us to Germany by examining ‘Criminalizing Black Dissent’, locating affect and race in the politics and practice of coercive migration control. She examines how the police and local courts intervened in and managed conflicts over deportation, and analyses how deportations are asymmetrically negotiated between migrants in reception facilities and state authorities. Like Parmar she explores race as a technology to manage social conflict, aid policing and criminalize dissent. While the impact of police raids and subsequent legal consequences for migrant communities was devastating, state strategy uses moral panic to unite authorities against migrants who oppose deportations.

Ioana Vrăbiescu’s analysis of why ‘Detention is morally exhausting’ points to melancholia as the best concept to explain the complex emotional mix lived by those who manage migrants’ detention centres in France. In detention centres, emotions are extreme but also denied, and both state and non-state actor are reluctant to contest the laws, practices, and rights of the institutions designed to detain and deport migrants. In detention centres the total obedience to the rule of law (l’état de droit) – the legalistic gaze—makes it almost sacrilegious to criticize the law and certainly an ideological failure, and this rather irrational positioning determines an overall atmosphere of melancholia and a spectrum of emotions deprived of their moral grounding. Vrăbiescu argues that the organization of detention in France endorses a legalistic gaze to keep the hostile system beyond the rule of law.

The contributors to this Special Issue draw on anthropology, criminology, political science and European studies. Thus, this Special Issue not only offers new data but also challenges to social science scholarship to address ethics and emotions in the racialized structures of immigration enforcement.

Taking stock of the affective turn in social sciences this Special Issue approached emotions and affects of migration control depicting their social, organizational, and moral function. It showed that at the workplace immigration enforcers struggle with their own moral principles while complying with increasingly restrictive laws and regulations.

Our collection of articles hopefully opens a new discussion on a functional and moral understanding of the working life of immigration policy implementation in Europe, and on the roles of ethical emotions at play while enforcing these policies. On the one hand, we have determined how racial and nationalistic arguments are disguised by affective understandings of work, duty and political acceptance. As some of the case studies illustrate, the affective governance of immigration has no borders but rather creates social boundaries and tolerates unacceptable state-agents’ behaviour. On the other hand, inter- and intra- organizational dynamics in between offices or alongside detention centres allow numbness and mutual support for what otherwise would be the enactment of unethical practices. Yet, again, ethics are to be questioned whether emotions of affects get analysed. Social racialized dynamics, ideological polarization, and the securitization of migration generate on the ground, at work, attitudes not resisting but more rather consenting inhumane practices against migrants. In sum, emotions, national or rational feelings, and affective atmospheres, are ways to reveal the human and moral cost of the troubled workplace of immigration enforcement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. http://www.irr.org.uk