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

Introduction

Political debate about immigration makes captivating political theatre. Interested publics can turn to their preferred media outlet to hear politicians—neatly divided into restrictionists and progressives—voice their indignation about the other side’s lack of acumen on the issue. These debates are not simply performative because the “winners” get to legislate immigration according to their priorities. The implementation politics of immigration control are equally significant, but their obscurity stands in contrast to the public nature of their legislative counterpart (Ellermann, 2009).

Frontline agents are protagonists at the implementation stage of immigration control, but their performances occur largely behind the closed doors of guarded government bureaucracies. These policy implementers—commonly understood as street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010)—apprehend immigrants, vet their asylum claims, screen their visa applications, manage their detention, and execute their removal, to name just a few of their critical functions. But because of the gatekeeping practices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and informal mechanisms of social closure among this occupational group, today’s immigration agents operate within a bureaucratic system that lacks transparency and is resistant to public accountability efforts (Martínez, Cantor, & Ewing, 2014). This obscurity is unacceptable, not only because the immigration bureaucracy is a government agency that should be accessible to the public but also because the system’s inscrutability compromises research and reform efforts.

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. I argue that the occupational culture of immigration agents is a critical mechanism that can stifle or boost the viability of legal reforms, depending on the alignment between the former and the latter. As such, efforts to reform the U.S. immigration system cannot be limited to formal legal changes, as these are seldom reliable proxies for frontline officers’ behaviors (Stuart, Armenta, & Osborne, 2015). To reform the U.S. immigration system, we need to call for legal and cultural change.

A cultural sociology of immigration control requires three analytic shifts. First, our analyses must recognize immigration enforcers as social control agents, instead of studying them solely through the lens of street-level bureaucracy. Social control agents wield the coercive power of the state and are its primary instruments of order maintenance in society. They have the power to use force—both lethal and nonlethal—to compel the state’s subjects to follow its rules and regulations (Tyler, Callahan, & Frost, 2007). Street-level bureaucrats are policy implementers who interact with clients on behalf of the government and have substantial discretionary power because of their relative autonomy from organizational authority (Lipsky, 2010). Some occupations, like police officers, are both street-level bureaucrats and social control agents. However, our choice of framing will direct our attention toward certain processes and away from others. Scholars who study immigration policy implementation have mostly used the framework of street-level bureaucracy, which focuses on discretionary decision-making. My goal in calling for a cultural sociology of immigration control is to move beyond this focus.

Relatedly, we must continue to study federal immigration agents, even as the configuration of actors involved in immigration matters has expanded. Local law enforcement officials have rightly received a great deal of research attention since they often exercise the “discretion that matters” (Motomura, 2010) when it comes to setting the deportation process in motion (Armenta, 2012; Coleman, 2012; Menjívar, 2014b; Provine, Varsanyi, Lewis, & Decker, 2016). However, DHS agents remain a critical part of the removal process and often take over once immigrants are in federal custody; they carry out an array of predeportation and deportation-adjacent control functions in courts, detention facilities, jails, police task forces, border cities, and along remote highways. We must scrutinize these DHS employees who continue to operate in powerful, but obscure ways in this localized immigration control era.

Finally, the criminalization of immigration in the United States reflects global shifts in how modern nations frame and manage human mobility (Bigo, 2002; Guiraudon & Lahav, 2000; Longazel & Woude, 2014; Menjívar, 2014a). As such, researchers who study immigration control culture must disrupt the methodological nationalism that permeates immigration literature (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002), especially through comparative methodologies (Dauvergne et al., 2012; FitzGerald & Cook-Martín, 2014). Cross-national collaborations between scholars engaged in compatible projects are an area to expand. By looking beyond territorial (and disciplinary) boundaries, we will gain a fuller understanding of how supranational processes manifest on the cultural level.

Before moving further, it is critical to acknowledge that definitions of culture are contested and that there is an extensive body of research on this concept (see Patterson, 2014, for a review). For my purposes, culture is both a system of meaning and set of skills that shape social actors’ behaviors (Sewell, 1992). This conceptualization may incorporate cognitive views that emphasize culture’s interpretive lens-quality (DiMaggio, 1997), as well as skill-based accounts that emphasize the habits, styles, and tools with which people navigate social life (Swidler, 1986). Analysts may also be inclined toward normative accounts that emphasize the impact of moral scripts on behavior (Herbert, 1998; Vaisey, 2009). The point is that by looking at the cultural realm, irrespective of approach, we will better understand and perhaps, eventually reform the U.S. immigration system.

Since culture is collectively constructed by and within social groupings, organizations are important sites for its production. Indeed, organizations, like the agencies that make up the U.S. immigration bureaucracy, foster social identities, perceptions, and corresponding patterns of behaviors that become the status quo through a complex process of legitimation (Johnson, Dowd, & Ridgeway, 2006; Suchman, 1995). The resultant patterns of assumptions and actions may seem odd or even objectionable to outsiders, but are taken-for-granted as logical and normatively appropriate by insiders (Brashears, Genkin, & Suh, 2017; Oberfield, 2014; Ouchi & Wilkins, 1985). There can be multiple subcultures within an organization and the extent to which organizational identities shape behavior will vary based on individual- and meso-level factors (Fine & Hallett, 2014; Oberfield, 2011). Still, organizational cultures and identities remain central to understanding the interplay between social structures, human agency, and social/policy outcomes.

Contextualizing Immigration Control Culture: The Department of Homeland Security

The United States is part of an international trend where countries are managing migration as a crime and security issue (Bigo, 2002; Dowling & Inda, 2013; Menjivar & Kanstroom, 2013). Scholars have expertly documented the legal changes that criminalized immigration in the United States (Abrego, Coleman, Martínez, Menjívar, & Slack, 2017; Chacon, 2007; Stumpf, 2006), as well as the corresponding bureaucratic ideologies that the DHS deploys on a system level (Andreas, 2009; Dunn, 1996; Jones, 2014; Nevins, 2010; Rodriguez & Paredes, 2014). These macro-level changes affect the training and socialization of immigration agents, but connections to the cultural level have seldom been elaborated.

Understanding the organizational structure of the DHS is a critical step toward analyzing immigration control culture. Whereas the Immigration and Naturalization Services agency (INS) had a conflicting service-enforcement mission that mediated the dominance of its enforcement functions (Meyers, Papademetriou, & Aleinikoff, 1998), the DHS encourages mission streamlining. Today’s immigration bureaucracy is a three-pronged entity—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) provides immigration services, while Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carry out enforcement functions. In their vision statements ² CBP and ICE emphasize their control functions, while the USCIS emphasizes the management of legal migration. There is little overlap between control and service provision in these statements, a distinction that is mirrored in different training tracks. USCIS officers are trained “. . . to adjudicate cases, interpret the law. . . understand policies, precedent decisions and legal trends . . . write legal decisions . . . [and learn] non-adversarial interview techniques” (USCIS 2016). In contrast, ICE agents learn about “. . . alien processing, fugitive operations, firearms and defensive techniques . . .” (The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers [FLETC], 2018a), while the USBP academy is a police training program that emphasizes immigration law (FLETC, 2018b). This structure within the DHS allows for more hardened and separate identities to flourish in its “service” and “enforcement” arms.

When we consider the bureaucratic structures above, we are reminded that USBP and ICE officers wield the coercive power of the state in an inherently exclusionary direction (Hiemstra, 2014). These agents allocate costs and punishments on behalf of the state (Ellermann, 2009) and are not in the business of distributing citizenship benefits, like USCIS bureaucrats. Immigration control agents are trained to understand and treat immigration as a crime and security issue; the culture this training engenders is ill-suited to implement humanitarian-minded legal reforms (McLeod, 2012; Pallister-Wilkins, 2015; Rabin, 2013). Yet scholarship on immigration policy implementation seldom dwells on this control function, opting instead to examine the relationship between bureaucratic behavior and policy outcomes vis-à-vis discretionary decision-making.

The excellent line of research on policy implementation in the INS exemplifies this approach. Seminal works took us “Inside the State” (Calavita, 1992) to show how bureaucrats negotiated multiple stakeholder interests and organizational priorities to implement historic immigration laws (Lau, 2006; Lytle-Hernandez, 2010; Magaña, 2003). Another strand elucidated bureaucratic decision-making in the area of deportation (Ellermann, 2006; Weissinger, 1996) and admissibility at ports of entry (Gilboy, 1991, 1992). Josiah Heyman’s work is particularly notable for its depth, having documented how immigration agents classify people and commodities at the southern border (2001, 2004, 2009), the rationalities (1995), and the moral ideas (2000) that organize their actions, as well as how Mexican American agents negotiate ethnoracial and bureaucratic boundaries (2002). Studies that bring the form and function of bureaucratic discretion to light will always be needed because they open the black box of policy implementation (see Asad, this issue, for an excellent example). However, if we focus solely on discretionary decision-making when studying immigration agents, we neglect other equally significant aspects of their occupational lives.

To be clear, my primary concern with an overreliance on street-level bureaucracy theory is that it directs attention toward decision-making in the implementation of a specific mandate. In most analyses of this type, occupational culture is not the subject of study—rather, it appears as a meaningful, but latent source for the decision-making heuristics that are the focus of study. The neglected aspects of organizational life are often cultural in nature, for instance bureaucrats’ taken-for-granted assumptions, behavioral norms that dominate the work environment, and the informal sanctions and status rewards that permeate bureaucratic life. These cultural processes inform bureaucratic behavior and are critical to understand, even when they cannot be neatly mapped on to a determinate policy outcome.

Conceptualizing immigration enforcers as social control agents is a promising way of moving beyond discretionary decision-making when studying this population. For one, this framing will compel us to cross-pollinate migration research with relevant strands of criminological literature. Cultural and narrative criminologists who study meaning making in crime control have produced important works on law enforcers (Herbert, 1996; Ugelvik, 2016). Furthermore, scholars working in the criminology of mobility are doing cutting-edge research that bridges sociolegal and criminological scholarship on migration (Bosworth, Parmar, & Vasquez, 2018; Pickering, & Ham, 2014). The nexus between these literatures and sociology of migration will grow naturally when the control function of immigration agents is centered.

Furthermore, recognizing immigration enforcers as social control agents facilitates comparisons to analogous cases, like prison guards, police officers, and military personnel, to name a few. For instance, from the work on police culture, we know that law enforcement officers tend to emphasize the danger of their profession, the suspiciousness and unpredictability of the public, the crime-fighting aspects of their work, and exhibit hypermasculine behaviors and high levels of in-group solidarity (Loftus, 2009). How might these subjectivities affect immigration enforcers’ interactions with immigrants, how they perceive their mission, and how they interpret their mandates? Surely, there is a great deal of overlap between immigration officers and other law enforcers, but it is unclear whether immigration policing creates a distinct set of practice logics and subjectivities that we have yet to discover (Côté-Boucher, Infantino, & Salter, 2014; Loftus, 2015).

As I emphasize the similarities between local police and immigration enforcers, I also want to caution against taking them as synonymous. There are two fundamental differences between local police and federal immigration authorities. First, police officers are charged with protecting and sanctioning local communities, of which undocumented immigrants can become de facto members. This element of de facto membership, by which I mean legal exclusion, but informal inclusion in the social fabric of local life (Wells, 2004) is consistent with the mission of police, but at odds with federal immigration agents’ role. The mission of federal immigration agents is to protect the homeland from foreign threats—whether they are inside or outside the territory. For these agents, undocumented immigrants are archetypal threats, regardless of their incorporation at the community level (Vega, 2018).

Second, police officers and immigration agents have distinct levels of accountability to local communities, in part due to their distinct mission. For example, in the excellent body of work on whether police participate in immigration enforcement, the preferences of the federal are consistently toward exclusion (Leerkes, Varsanyi, & Engbersen, 2012; Lewis, Provine, Varsanyi, & Decker, 2012; Menjívar, 2014b; Varsanyi, 2010; Wong, 2012). It is local police departments and county sheriffs that must consider their political context, and their relationship with immigrant communities as they decide how to orient toward enforcement (Armenta, 2017; Lewis & Ramakrishnan, 2007; Provine et al., 2016). This is not to say that federal agents working on the local level are isolated from grassroots politics (Ellermann, 2006; Wells, 2004), or that a department’s policy toward immigrants maps on to what street-level police officers do (Armenta, 2016). What it does mean is that police and federal agents have distinct missions and accountability structures vis-à-vis the undocumented immigrant population. This creates space for police officers to use their discretionary power in favor of immigrants, in a way that is less true for federal immigration agents. These differences are worth elaborating as we continue to study linkages between local and federal immigration authorities.

In sum, federal immigration agents remain critical actors in the contemporary system, despite the broadening of actors that make up the “local migration state” (Coleman, 2012) and “immigration industrial complex” (Golash-Boza, 2009). The devolution of immigration powers to police and other actors widens the net by which immigrants are ensnarled into the deportation system (Menjívar, 2014b) but federal officers are still largely responsible for the detention and removal of these immigrants, whether directly or in their decisions about who to contract out for services. If we neglect federal agents, we will widen the existing knowledge gap on what happens once immigrants are in federal custody, producing an incomplete and lopsided representation of contemporary immigration control.

Discussion

This call emphasizes the need for a cultural sociology of contemporary immigration control work. I argue that the occupational culture of immigration agents is a critical mechanism that can stifle or boost the viability of legal reforms, depending on the alignment between the former and the latter. Although the relationship between bureaucratic behavior and policy outcomes is a centerpiece of policy implementation literature, we must rejuvenate our approach to examining this relationship. To this end, I recommend three analytic shifts: (1) we must recognize immigration enforcers as agents of social control, (2) we must move beyond discretionary decision-making, and (3) we must not limit our research to the territorial and conceptual confines of the nation-state. These moves will enable us to better understand and eventually reform the U.S. immigration system.

I would be remiss not to mention the access issues inherent in pursuing this agenda. The primary methodological tools of cultural analysis—interviews and ethnographic observation—require access to people and places (Lamont & Swidler, 2014). But the DHS deploys both formal and informal gatekeeping mechanisms that keep researchers out. While there are real challenges in gaining access to DHS employees, researchers must not turn away from scrutinizing the state and its agents because of them. After all, what is at stake here is not only the advancement of a body of literature, but the viability of efforts to reform a system that is in dire need of transformation.

Relatedly, a cultural sociology of immigration control work requires local, grounded engagement with people and places, but it cannot be parochial—especially given global trends in the criminalization and securitization of immigration. We can broaden this research field by developing comparative methodologies to analyze how global developments manifest locally (Dauvergne et al., 2012). However, we can also examine how macro-level shifts in the management of human mobility manifest at the cultural level. For instance, while we need to study how international technological innovations are automating decision-making (Dekkers, Woude, & Leun, 2016), we also need to know how these technologies change frontline immigration officers’ sense of expertise, mission, and power. Furthermore, just as we should investigate the migration-related portfolios of international security and prison companies (Koulish, 2007), we must also elaborate how these corporations come to define professionalism and occupational identities. A third way to have a more global view is to study the normative realm of this type of work. For instance, we can examine whether there is a supranational moral economy in this type of social control and elaborate how this set of norms, values, and emotions play out among immigration agents working in distinct national settings (Fassin, 2005). These are just some ways to link supranational developments in the management of human mobility to culture.

While I am calling for increased attention to immigration agents’ occupational culture, I do not mean to imply that there is a singular culture associated with this profession or that all immigration agents share one culture. Examining the cultural level will actually reveal variation in how agents with different social locations, years of experience, and level of expertise perceive immigration phenomena, understand their role, and carry out their mandates. For instance, while Latino immigration agents have a great deal in common with their non-Latino counterparts (Correa & Thomas, 2015) they are also more likely to deploy empathetic discourses when discussing their jobs (Heyman, 2002; Prieto, 2015; Vega, 2018). It is unclear whether Latinos’ empathetic discourses translate to practices, but this research reminds us to be cognizant of differences as we document cultural patterns.

Conclusion

In the summer of 2018, the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the southern border separated thousands of asylum-seeking families. Actions like these remind us of the vast gap between the politico-bureaucratic logics of immigrant criminality and humanitarian character of the phenomena immigration agencies are managing (Rodriguez & Paredes, 2014). As is usually the case, the outrage against and support for the family separation policy was focused on the political elites who issued and defended it, with very little deliberation about the frontline enforcers who enacted it. Without cultural analysis of how these agents justified the act of physically separating children from their parents, we inadvertently create the impression that they are simply cogs in the machine. This could not be farther from the truth.

President Trump’s power to make good on his campaign promises is buoyed by the fit between his restrictionist policies and the control culture of the frontline. This fit increases the president’s executive capacity in the area of immigration. In contrast, President Obama’s selective enforcement mandates were subverted by agents, who went as far as to sue the administration for directing them to “. . . violate federal law . . . [and] . . . their oaths to uphold and support federal law” (Crane et al. v. Napolitano, 2012). I know of no such lawsuits brought by immigration agents who were forced to separate families. In effect, the perceptions, tools, and normative ideals of frontline enforcers are a critical piece of the “formidable machinery” (Meissner, Kerwin, Chishti, & Bergeron, 2013) that is the United States’ enforcement system—these cultural subjectivities are as important to the viability of reform as the laws we pass.