The Moral Worlds of Migration Policing

This chapter focuses on the moral worlds of migration policing. It reflects on the moral categories officers mobilize to understand the people they deal with, the moral meaning they attach to their actions, as well as to their job, and the range of emotional reactions that they express -including the moral pains involved in doing border work. The moral economy of immigration work is dominated by distinct and often conflicting logics and rationales (the bureaucratic, the punitive, and the compassionate), and underpinned by a political economy of immigration controls which simultaneously moralize and normalize immigration lawbreaking. In exploring how officers on the ground navigate and give content to this moral economy, we grasp the complex, ambivalent, and polyvalent sentiments mobilized in the policing of migration, and the distinct moral dilemmas that these officers encounter in their daily work. In the quest to produce a ‘bordered order’ (Aas 2013), they appreciate not only the arbitrariness of border control (and its inadequacy to confront the profound global disparities underpinning status illegality), but also its capricious operation, which does not deliver on the promises of getting rid of criminals, and letting in ‘good’ migrants. They convey the emotionally and morally draining nature of border controls and its human costs on both sides of state coercion, which exercise can equally brutalize and humanize those bestowing it. In conciliating the conflicting demands for care and order, empathy and suspicion, these officers often felt unable to achieve either.