How bureaucracies shape access to rights: the implementation of family reunification in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Throughout the European Union, national governments are amending family reunification laws in order to restrict migration flows. Migration scholars point out that the judiciary is one of the factors hindering migration policy reforms from having the restrictive outcomes intended by national governments. This literature, however, tends to neglect what happens after legislative texts are written down and overlooks the continuation of the policy-making process during the implementation phase. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy literature, I address this gap by focusing on the impact of court decisions on street-level actors implementing family reunification in Belgium. Relying on ethnographic methods, I have conducted extensive fieldwork in the Immigration Office, the Belgian public agency which processes the applications for family reunification. The empirical material reveals that migration officers’ response to court rulings is based on collective representations of case law rather than on court rulings per se. Such findings shed light on the role of the administration and in particular, the collective production of meanings by the administration.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration policy
• implementation
• judicialization
• family migration
• street-level bureaucracy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 House of Representatives, Report 19 May 2011 (Chambre des représentants de Belgique, Rapport, 19 mai 2011, DOC 53 0443/018).

2 Ruling 121/2013 of the Constitutional Court of Belgium dated 26 September 2013 June 2007 (C.C. n° 121/2013)

3 In this paper, for privacy purposes, I do not distinguish between managers of the office and managers of sections of the office. I treat these participants as a group, since they have authority over other civil servants.

4 For privacy purposes, the names of all participants have been changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Université libre de Bruxelles and by the Fond David et Alice van Buuren.