Micro-Management of Irregular Migration

Front matter

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Micro-Management of Irregular Migration

Contents

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2.3 Public Sector Organisations and Street- Level Duaci as Local Mediators of Competing Functional Imperatives ani Institutional LORS sra ciserrrrerei Sed dR ERROR RA 29 2.4 A Framework for Systematic Analysis

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Chapter 1 A) Introduction Geek for

I think that we generally tend to simplify the complexity of the whole migration process ... but then sometimes in front of the client, in your workplace, you as a person have to respond to all this complexity.

‘Street-level bureaucrat’, interviewed in Barcelona.

This book is about migration, migration control, and the unavoidable irregularities and everyday problems that result from their interplay. It primarily engages with the perspective of people who face some of these problems because they work in institutions like schools, hospitals or social service departments, where immigration control often overlaps with public service provision. What I wanted to understand is when, why, and how exactly these people respond to, and thereby manage, at least some of the complexity of irregular migration. Often, these micro-level responses involve difficult decisions to be taken on a case-by-case basis, whereby the individual teacher, social worker, or health centre receptionist acts not just as a person, but also as a public employee who fulfils a certain role for the welfare system. Every such decision can significantly change what it means to be living in a place without having the responsible government’s permission to do so. This condition is what I refer to as migrant irregularity. Through public service provision, migrant (but also other) irregularity is not only being (re)produced but also experienced on a daily basis. The book therefore also gives voice to the people who themselves are in an ‘irregular’ situation. Underlying this approach is the conviction that only by taking seriously and fruitfully combining both of these perspectives can we properly explain how migration governance works and why it often not only fails to achieve its proclaimed objectives but also causes a lot of damage in failing.

One of the core objectives of migration governance is precisely to prevent migration from happening outside of the legal framework. The same legal framework, however, has long rendered irregular migration the only form of mobility that is available to many people in search for better life chances, including employment

© The Author(s) 2022 1 R. Schweitzer, Micro-Management of Irregular Migration, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91731-9_1 opportunities but also the absence of violence and persecution. Already in 2008, years before the ‘long summer of migration’ and in spite of already intensified control and surveillance of the European Union’s (EU) external borders, between 1.9 and 3.8 million people were estimated to be residing ‘illegally’ within them! (CLANDESTINO, 2009). Most had either crossed these borders lawfully but subsequently overstayed their tourist visa or temporary residence permit; or they arrived as refugees but could not or simply did not return to their country of citizenship after being refused asylum or other right to remain. What they all have in common is a legal-administrative status that itself constitutes explicit — even though largely invisible — evidence for the failure of contemporary migration governance. The only factual evidence of irregularity consists in the lack of a stamp or sticker in their passport or the equivalent data on a chip card. This has significant implications for how, where and by whom migrant irregularity can actually be detected and potentially acted upon.

Governments often (say they) try to ‘stop’ irregular migration by preventing unlawful residents from accessing mainstream public services. The underlying rationale is to thereby not only encourage their so-called ‘voluntary’ return but also dissuade potential newcomers from risking to end up in the same irregular — and thus to be made uncomfortable — situation. In order to achieve effective exclusion from these services, at least some of the existing rules and established practices according to which they are provided to the local population need to be modified. For service users this often means having to provide additional documentary evidence of the place, length, and sometimes legality of their residence. It also means that at least some of the people working within the corresponding institutions have to check these documents, and thus be encouraged to apply the logic of immigration control in their everyday work, where it often conflicts but can also partly converge with their own administrative or professional duties and the original function of their institution. Dita Vogel (2000, p. 416) described such instances as ‘cooperation dilemmas’, whereby “the agencies which cooperate with the aliens’ authorities must sacrifice part of their other objectives”. Such cooperation comes in different forms and intensity and causes dilemmas in all kinds of institutional settings. How these dilemmas are solved says a lot about what migrant irregularity is taken to mean in any particular context; and it is often where they are not resolved that irregular migration becomes a problem.

This book systematically compares how providers and administrators of various public services in London and Barcelona deal with the everyday dilemmas of irregular migration. The two cities are embedded in very distinct national contexts. In Chap. 4 I discuss the different ways in which the issue of irregular migration is being framed and addressed in Britain and in Spain. The former has become emblematic for what Matthew Gibney (2008) called the “deportation turn’, and the UK government’s official strategy to “create [...] a really hostile environment for

! Around the same time the European Commission (2009) referred to an estimated number of “about eight million illegal immigrants living in the Union”.

illegal migration”, as Theresa May announced in 2012, has since then determined much of its policy towards unlawful residents. The Spanish approach, on the contrary, is characterised by a relatively accessible mechanism for the regularisation of irregular residents on the basis of their social and economic ties within the country, indicating a much more pragmatic attitude towards their unlawful presence. These official policy approaches not only shape the everyday meaning of migrant irregularity, but also, and accordingly, the local provision of public healthcare, education and social assistance to irregular migrants. In each of these spheres, however, immigration law thereby also intersects with intrinsic logics, existing rules and established practices of inclusion as well as exclusion.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 look at these three fields of service provision not only as potential sites of everyday bordering and its contestation, but also as everyday workplaces, within which immigration status can be anything from hugely significant to almost irrelevant. This refines Etienne Balibar’s (2003, p. 1) famous portrayal of contemporary borders as being “dispersed a little everywhere” by highlighting their overall “patchy, makeshift, inconsistent and failure-prone character” (Burridge et al., 2017, p. 245). It also fits with the important observation that irregular migrants are always included in some spheres of social life but simultaneously excluded from many others (Castles, 1995; Cvajner & Sciortino, 2010; Ruhs & Anderson, 2010; Mezzadra, 2011; Chauvin & Garcés-Mascarefias, 2012; Van Meeteren, 2014; Echeverria, 2020). Most empirical studies have analysed this fact from the perspective of formal law and policy or the people who are to be excluded. Instead, my focus lies on the people who are increasingly expected to do the excluding. By adopting the viewpoint of different welfare institutions and various of their employees, this book offers a novel perspective on the de-territorialisation of borders and internalisation of immigration control. What interests me in particular is to what extent and under which conditions individual welfare workers (can) use their agency to contest, adjust or reproduce formal structures and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.

My analysis is based on a rich body of original, qualitative field data collected between July 2014 and October 2015 in London and Barcelona, including almost 90 semi-structured interviews with local providers and administrators of public services, irregular residents, and mediating actors like representatives of NGOs and local authorities. More than half of these informants are what Michael Lipsky (1980) famously conceptualised as ‘street-level bureaucrats’: Local actors who implement government policy through their own interactions and everyday relations with members of the public, whereby they routinely exercise significant degrees of power, autonomy and individual discretion. As doctors, teachers, social workers or administrative personnel in local health centres, schools and social service departments they are agents of the state and fulfil important control and gatekeeping functions. Without them, the government would be unable to provide public services,

?T. May, cited in The Telegraph, 25 May 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/929 1483/Theresa-May-interview- Were-going-to-give-illegal-migrants-a-really-hostilereception.html (last accessed 15/12/2017).

but also to exercise its power over the population, as Michel Foucault (2002, p. 337) has noted: “If we speak of the power of laws, institutions, and ideologies, if we speak of structures or mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others”. Since street-level bureaucrats are given significant autonomy in exercising their power over potential service users, their actions not only underpin but can also undermine the power of the law. For Maurizio Ambrosini (2017) they therefore constitute one of various categories of ‘intermediary actors’ whose involvement explains why internalised immigration control often remains rather ineffective.

Those street-level bureaucrats I personally spoke to did generally not see themselves as particularly powerful, nor personally involved in immigration control. For many of them it was not necessary and would have been difficult to systematically distinguish irregular migrants from other local residents, patients, students or clients. Others, however, were obliged to, or at least felt they should, take immigration status into account when establishing a potential service user’s eligibility or providing a service. Among the latter were also some who not only (felt they) had to detect migrant irregularity, but also inform the responsible authority in case they did. In their everyday work they thus experienced different variants of what John Park (2013) called the ‘Huckleberry Finn Problem’. He thereby referred to the ambivalent situation that ‘Huck’ Finn — the young protagonist of Mark Twain’s famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — is facing when he meets Jim, the runaway slave. Huck immediately knows that he should return the slave to his rightful master (who he personally knows) or at least report him to the men he sees looking for the fugitive. For various reasons, however, he decides not to do so. Instead, he makes Jim his trusted companion on his adventurous voyage on a raft down the Mississippi river, thereby ultimately helping him to escape the force of the law. The central idea that Park’s (2013, p. 12) reading of Huckleberry Finn transfers from pre-Civil War Illinois, where Twain’s story begins, to our current times, is that of a law that creates categories of people with disparate rights and opportunities, structuring not just disabilities for the people who suffer the law’s force, but also dilemmas for people who are often placed in the awkward position of triggering the law’s force when they come face to face with an ‘unlawful’ person.

The concrete question that Park (2013, p. 12) poses to his readers seems particularly pertinent for many street-level bureaucrats: “What should we do now when we encounter an ‘unlawful’ person?”, whereby he refers to potential encounters with migrants in irregular situations.

Departing from this question I developed a simple analytical framework for a close comparative analysis of how the people directly involved in the public provision of healthcare, education and social assistance deal with such encounters. This framework is structured along two dimensions: (i) whether or not these actors are supposed to (or feel they should) know the immigration status of the person in front of them, and (ii) whether or not they are supposed to (or feel they should) tell the relevant state authority in case they find out or suspect that the person they are dealing with is an irregular immigrant. Answering these questions sheds light on the complex interplay between formal law and policy, the internal rules and logics operating within institutions, and the ethical or practical obligations and constraints attached to particular roles or professions like that of a doctor, head teacher, or receptionist. The aim of employing this framework is three-fold: firstly, it helps to situate these social and institutional roles in relation to migrant irregularity as well as its control. Secondly, it allows to identify instances where, and the mechanisms through which, their holders are encouraged or obliged to either know or tell. Thirdly, it provides a useful perspective to look for pockets of resistance against having to either know or tell (or both), and to find out what exactly triggers such resistance.

The micro-processes I analyse not only reflect the distinctive ways in which the British and Spanish states officially frame and address the issue of irregular migration, but also play out differently depending on the concrete institutional context and implementing actors. In each case, the responsible agents of the respective state have to consolidate a distinct (national) logic of exclusion towards irregular migrants with the highly context-dependent logics of inclusion and exclusion that normally underpin the entitlement and access of local residents, patients, students or welfare recipients. This is what I call the micro-management of irregular migration, which often limits but can also increase the effectiveness of internal border control. It also helps to explain why irregular migrants’ claims and eligibility for public services sometimes become highly contested and politicised, while in other cases they are more or less explicitly accepted. Overall, my study contributes to a better understanding of the concrete mechanisms that either help or hinder the internalisation of immigration control within specific institutional settings and across national contexts. It thereby not only highlights the intrinsic limits of such control, but also shows that rather than a solution, internal control is often part of the problem that irregular migration poses for society. Any successful ‘management’ of migration must therefore always also involve careful management of migration control.

The remainder of the book is organised in the following way: Chap. 2 further develops the theoretical and conceptual foundations and presents my analytical framework in more detail. Chapter 3 briefly describes the research design and methodological approach, and Chap. 4 provides the necessary context. In the subsequent three chapters I systematically apply my conceptual and analytical frameworks to the organisational fields of healthcare (Chap. 5), education (Chap. 6) and social assistance (Chap. 7). Each of these empirical chapters closely examines the relevant laws and policies enacted at various administrative levels, as well as their local implementation. Mostly through the accounts of my respondents, I discuss the ethical or other concerns, practical difficulties and organisational conflicts that either migrant irregularity itself, or the internalisation of its control, creates for individual welfare workers and the institutions they work for. On that basis, I systematically map the various positions that different categories of workers more or less willingly assume in relation to immigration control and enforcement. The concluding Chap. 8 summarises the findings by drawing systematic comparisons across the three sectors and between the two field sites and highlights their wider implications.

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Burridge, A., et al. (2017). Polymorphic borders. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5(3), 239-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2017.1297253

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Chapter 2 A) The ‘Management’ of Migration — gese And of the Resulting Irregularities

In a press release outlining its “vision for the area of freedom, security and justice” the European Commission (2009) proposed that Member States should “[e]nsure a flexible immigration policy that is in line with the needs of the job market whilst at the same time support the integration of immigrants and tackle illegal immigration”. At least two questionable assumptions underlie this vision: that a neat distinction exists between those individuals whose integration should be supported and those whose immigration must be ‘tackled’; and that both goals can be achieved without respective measures interfering with each other or the demands of an increasingly transnational economy. What the proposal conceals are the many conflicts and contradictions between the very different interests, norms and logics that underlie these as well as other important functions of the state, which also include the provision of welfare services to its population. The various policies and practices aimed at regulating the movement of people across state borders are often subsumed under the term ‘migration management’, which provides “a convenient umbrella under which very different activities can be regrouped and given an apparent coherence, thus also facilitating cooperation between actors who would otherwise have little in common” (Geiger & Pécoud, 2010, p. 3). While many different actors and various levels of government are effectively involved in the management of international migration (Hepburn & Zapata-Barrero, 2014), the overall responsibility and formal decision-making power lies with the (migrant receiving) nation-state, which in order for migration to occur, “must be willing to accept immigration and to grant rights to outsiders” (Hollifield, 2004, p. 885). This does not mean, however, that by not accepting it, governments can prevent immigration from happening; but they can render it ‘irregular’.

The making of the distinction between regular and irregular migration is an important articulation of the nation-state’s sovereign power over its territory and population. It is the basis upon which states control and limit access to their territory and can deport unwanted foreigners from within it. At the same time, state governments can also effectively unmake this distinction by establishing paths to regularisation. In practice, however, no liberal state has ever been able to prevent all illegal

© The Author(s) 2022 9 R. Schweitzer, Micro-Management of Irregular Migration, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91731-9_2 entry, nor to deport or regularise all those unlawfully present. In fact, it is precisely their inability to avoid irregular migration that requires liberal states to deal with this phenomenon and thus to respond to its complexity. Part of this response is what I call the micro-management of irregular migration. That is, the formal or informal consolidation of a governmental logic that officially demands the exclusion of a person from the national territory where s/he is an irregular immigrant, with the various subjacent pressures for the same person’s inclusion as a local resident, worker, patient, student, and so on. Much of this micro-management takes place within the institutions of the welfare state, which often struggle to meet (or otherwise deal with) irregular residents’ fundamental needs and most legitimate claims. It is this rather indirect and obscure aspect of migration management that I am concerned with throughout this book.

By aiming or claiming to ‘effectively manage migration’, politicians arguably evoke the idea that immigration is (or at least can be brought) under their control. It is important to note, however, that the original meaning of the verb ‘to manage’ was not to be fully in control of something or someone but instead ‘to handle or train a horse’; and that precisely because the untrained horse cannot be fully controlled, its handling used to take place in the manége — the etymological precursor of the term. As a place initially created to maximise the safety of both the horse and its trainer, the manége later also became a site of spectacle where riders display their horsemanship as well as the discipline of their horses and where circuses exhibit their spectacular or exotic performances for the entertainment of their audiences. This can be related to certain practices of migration management, which are also — even if that is not always made explicit or presented in public — the response to what effectively is a lack of control. And they too, involve the handling and sanctioning of certain irregularities and (miss-)behaviours. The more or less visible display of physical violence is thereby used as evidence of the government seemingly ‘being in control’. Nicolas De Genova (2013) referred to this aspect of immigration control as the ‘spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’, comprising not only the ‘scene of exclusion’ but also ‘the obscene of inclusion’ of irregular migrants within the legal, social and economic structures of the societies in which they live.

At the same time, the very terminology also invites consideration of the theoretical and empirical parallels between the management of migration and that of private companies as well as public services. Both have experienced a ‘managerial revolution’ of their own, which in the case of the former has been described as the replacement of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces by the ‘visible hand of management’ (Chandler, 1977).? More recently, also the public service sector in many Western European countries has seen the establishment of various administrative management positions interposing direct government oversight and control within

' See: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/manage (last accessed 15/12/2017).

? Whereas in organisation studies the term ‘micro-management’ usually refers to an (undesirable) excess of management in terms of its reach or detail (e.g. Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2003), here, the term indicates that in practice, irregular migration is often being managed at the micro level of individual interactions.

bureaucratic structures, and thus reflecting an increasing market orientation and vision of the citizen as a consumer of public services (Walsh, 1994; Webb, 2006; Hasenfeld & Garrow, 2012). In both cases, the managers — responsible for controlling or administering a particular set of resources, processes or practices — assume an intermediary role within a certain relationship of power: they manage and are themselves managed at the same time.

Scholars critically engaged with managerial practices within businesses and other organisations (see McKinlay & Starkey, 1998), various fields of social policy (McKee, 2009) or contemporary immigration regimes (Inda, 2006; Walters, 2015) have therefore often drawn on the ideas and concepts of Michel Foucault. What makes his work so useful as the basis for such analyses is his refined understanding of the exercise of power not as direct and absolute domination but in the form of “governmentality’, by which he means “a conduct of conducts” as well as “a management of possibilities” and thus a way “to structure the possible field of action of others” (Foucault, 2002a, p. 341). Such power relations are characterised by significant degrees of “informed consent, autonomy, voluntary action, choice, and nondirectiveness’’, rather than complete and unidirectional rule and authority (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 174). Public service provision is one of many spheres where the state’s sovereign power to neatly define, control, punish and exclude irregularities loses at least some of its grip, and must be complemented by more ‘governmental’ logics and modalities of power.

This chapter presents the theoretical and analytical framework through which I have studied the micro-management of irregular migration. On one hand, I thereby draw on the longstanding body of literature concerned with conceptualising the role of ‘the state’ in migration policies and policymaking, as well as more recent academic work on migrant irregularity as the product but also mirror of these policies. On the other hand, I look at some of the theoretical and empirical work done in the field of organisation studies, which helps to explain how organisations themselves deal with multiple and often contradictory norms and institutionalised logics originating both inside and outside of a particular organisational or professional field. The two strands of literature are linked via a Foucauldian understanding of governmental power and the conceptualisation of migrant irregularity as a ‘code’ through which the logic of immigration control is inscribed into existing power relations within and between different organisations. This theoretical approach helps to overcome the often too simplistic understanding of ‘the state’ that characterises much of the migration studies literature (Gill, 2010) by disaggregating the agency involved in the ‘management of migration’, and accounting for the multiple interests, rationales and constraints that underlie the involvement of very different actors at various administrative levels.

2.1 The State as the ‘Manager’ of Migration?

I don’t want to say that the sate isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state — in two senses. First of all, because the state, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations; and, further, because the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations (Foucault, 2002b, p. 122).

In principle, democratic governance means that people’s ideas and opinions are translated into formal legal frameworks and laws, which then — mediated through local implementation processes — determine actual policy outcomes (Deutsch, 1970). In this way the rule of law guides the actions of individuals as well as public and private institutions. Particularly with regard to policy-making in the field of immigration, which has become a highly politicised and much researched topic, academic debate has long circled around the question of why these regulatory processes often fail to achieve the desired outcomes or declared objectives (Soysal, 1994; Freeman, 1995; Sassen, 1996; Joppke, 1998; Sciortino, 2000; Castles, 2004; Lahav & Guiraudon, 2006). More specifically, scholars identified a ‘gap’ between the official aims of immigration policies — which increasingly reflect the rising public pressure to restrict further unwanted immigration — and their often more liberal outcome regarding not only the admission of foreigners to the country but also their access to various social and economic rights (Hollifield, 1986; Cornelius et al., 1994). Where such rights are extended to people who have not been formally admitted, the underlying conflicts are particularly pronounced.

While the claim that national governments are generally ‘losing control’ over unwanted immigration remains contested (cf. Brubaker, 1994) the identified ‘gap’ has been related to a wide range of potential causes located both within and outside the realm of receiving states. One set of explanations points to the expansion of human rights and rights-based conceptions of membership that increasingly cut across national borders and citizenship, and thereby contribute to an alleged decline of the nation-state: Yasemin Soysal’s (1994) much-disputed vision of a post-national model of citizenship — based on ‘universal personhood’ rather than national belonging — derives its legitimacy from a ‘transnational discourse of human rights’ that entails certain obligations for states towards not only their own nationals but also aliens who legally reside within their borders, such as guest workers or students. For David Jacobson (1996, p. 2) this extension of ‘rights across borders’ has also significantly altered the legal position of migrants living ‘illegally’ within the borders of liberal states, which increasingly have to accept and respond to at least some of their claims. While human rights themselves “evolve from the nation-state” (p. 3), it is through them, he argues, that “[t]he state is becoming less a sovereign agent and more an institutional forum of a larger international and constitutional order based on human rights” (p. 2/3). Others have related the state’s limited capacity to control immigration to the complex and powerful macro-dynamics driving migration processes, including transnational networks of information, people and communication, and the highly unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities (Sassen, 1996;