Street-level bureaucrats implementing nation states’ migration policies increasingly find themselves in a structural tension between providing social assistance and regulating the flows of people entering and leaving the national territory. As a result, doing migration work involves a wide range of difficult, ambivalent situations. This article examines how and under which conditions these tensions translate into moral and political dilemmas in street-level bureaucrats’ everyday work. In doing so, it draws upon original qualitative research with street-level bureaucrats working in the Belgian programme for assisted voluntary return. The article concludes by proposing an approach centred around the notion of immunisation so as to understand the social context in which ambivalence and its contraries are produced.
ArendtH (1977) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin Books.
2.
AshforthBEHumphreyRH (1993) Emotional labor in service roles: The influence of identity. Academy of Management Review18(1): 88–115.
3.
BaumanZ (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
4.
BoltanskiLThévenotL (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth. Trans. Porter C. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
5.
BrubakerR (2001) The return of assimilation? Changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany, and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies24(4): 531–548.
6.
ChambonASIrvingAEpsteinL (eds) (1999) Reading Foucault for Social Work. New York: Columbia University Press.
7.
EggeboH (2012) ‘With a heavy heart’: Ethics, emotions and rationality in Norwegian immigration administration. Sociology47(2): 301–317.
8.
FeldmanG (2013) The specific intellectual’s pivotal position: Action, compassion and thinking in administrative society, an Arendtian view. Social Anthropology21(2): 135–154.
9.
FineR (2007) Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge.
10.
FreireP (2014) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Bloomsbury Press.
11.
GiddensA (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
12.
GrahamM (2002) Emotional bureaucracies: Emotions, civil servants, and immigrants in the Swedish welfare state. Ethos30(3): 199–226.
13.
HallA (2010) ‘These people could be anyone’: Fear, contempt (and empathy) in a British Immigration Removal Centre. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies36(6): 881–898.
14.
HerzfeldM (1992) The Social Production of Indifference. New York: Berg.
15.
HeymanJM (2000) Respect for outsiders? Respect for the law? The moral evaluation of high scale issues by US Immigration Officers. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute6(4): 635–652.
16.
HochschildA (1983) The Managed Heart: On the Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
17.
JamesDKillickD (2012) Empathy and expertise: Case workers and immigration/asylum applicants in London. Law and Social Inquiry37(2): 430–455.
18.
KochA (2014) The politics and discourse of migrant return: The role of UNHCR and IOM in the governance of return. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies40(6): 905–923.
19.
LietaertIBroekaertEDerluynI (2016) From social instrument to migration management tool: Assisted voluntary return programmes – the case of Belgium. Social Administration and Policy. Epub ahead of print 14January2016. DOI: 10.1111/spol.12185.
20.
LietaertIDerluynIBroekaertE (2013) Returnees’ perspectives on their re-migration processes. International Migration52(5): 144–158.
21.
LipskyM (1980) Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.
22.
RancièreJ (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Ross K. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
23.
SchinkelW (2010) The virtualization of citizenship. Critical Sociology36(2): 265–283.
24.
SchusterLMajidiN (2013) What happens post-deportation? The experience of deported Afghans. Migration Studies1(2): 221–240.
25.
Van HouteMSiegelMDavidsT (2014) Return to Afghanistan: Migration as reinforcement of socio-economic stratification. Population, Space and Place21(8): 692–703.
26.
WhartonAS (2009) The sociology of emotional labor. Annual Review of Sociology35: 147–165.
27.
ZapfDHolzM (2006) On the positive and negative effects of emotion work in organizations. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology15(1): 1–28.
