Borrelli, Lisa Marie

Whom to punish? – Street-level dilemmas within the Swedish Border Police
2020

This chapter examines the role of Swedish border police officers during and beyond encounters with irregularised migrant individuals, using ethnographically collected data. The chapter aims to trace street-level practices and street-level bureaucrats’ handling of emotional encounters and the underlying moralising discourses regarding irregularised migrants’ presence on the territory. It explores the increasingly intertwined relation between migration policies and criminal law (hence called ‘crimmigration’), which can evoke strong moralistic emotional responses in officers. In particular, it focuses on mobile units, tasked with detecting and potentially detaining irregularised migrants before deportation, as well as the conducting of identity checks at workplaces. During this task, officers move between searching for and punishing the employer, human traffickers or smugglers and the enforcement of migration law, ending in the detention and deportation of migrants with precarious legal status. Thus, although individuals are exploited and officers have, ostensibly at least, an interest in ‘punishing’ the employer, it is migrants who feel these repercussions in the first instance.This tension invokes intense emotional reactions for both parties, hence the importance of Hochschild’s concept of ‘emotional labour’ in helping us to understand what is occurring. It is further argued that in order to understand micro-translations of societal norms and broader discourses, there is a need to study street-level reactions to migrants with precarious legal status, particularly given the (gendered) discrimination or structural violence that can come into being.