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Restricting Immigration: Practices, Experiences and Resistance
Titre du projet
Restricting Immigration: Practices, Experiences and Resistance
Description
The right to define and control who is allowed to enter and to be present on the national territory characterizes state sovereignty. However, international human rights standards as well as international treaties constrain the will of nation-states to control migration exclusively according to their own interests. During the last decades, the measures taken in order to try to prevent unwanted migrants from arriving and to make those people whose presence is unlawful leave the territory have increased, both in scope and intensity. Nevertheless, certain foreign nationals enter illegally. Others resist attempts to their removal and cannot be excluded from a given territory – be it due to human rights issues, to practical obstacles, or other reasons.
Aims of the project
This project aims at shedding light on the way exclusion of foreign nationals is practiced, lived and contested in the context of current Swiss migration politics. It investigates the measures taken with the goal to prevent the entry and stay of certain social groups considered to be unwanted because they do not correspond to the current migration paradigm. Thus, the study focuses on existing exclusion practices and seeks to depict experiences and (re-)actions of people who execute policies of exclusion in practice and people at whom these practices are directed. Among the latter are people trying to enter Switzerland, undocumented migrant workers, rejected asylum seekers, migrants who lost their right to stay – all of them undergoing exclusion procedures. On a more general level, the project aims at contributing to the debate on the contentious relationship between migration control and human rights.
The project is especially interested in the external spatial exclusion of immigrants: Be it of people who try to enter Swiss territory or people who used to live in Switzerland (legally or illegally) and are obliged to leave the country. A choice of case studies, based on an inventory of existing exclusion practices towards foreign nationals, will allow looking at those places where spatial exclusion is implemented, lived and contested. This includes, for example, border control at the external borders, in trains and at airports, administrative detention, as well as forceful removal. The study analyzes the practices and experiences of different actors involved in migration control such as immigrants undergoing exclusion procedures, officials in charge of different tasks related to immigration and staff working in specialized institutions.
Aims of the project
This project aims at shedding light on the way exclusion of foreign nationals is practiced, lived and contested in the context of current Swiss migration politics. It investigates the measures taken with the goal to prevent the entry and stay of certain social groups considered to be unwanted because they do not correspond to the current migration paradigm. Thus, the study focuses on existing exclusion practices and seeks to depict experiences and (re-)actions of people who execute policies of exclusion in practice and people at whom these practices are directed. Among the latter are people trying to enter Switzerland, undocumented migrant workers, rejected asylum seekers, migrants who lost their right to stay – all of them undergoing exclusion procedures. On a more general level, the project aims at contributing to the debate on the contentious relationship between migration control and human rights.
The project is especially interested in the external spatial exclusion of immigrants: Be it of people who try to enter Swiss territory or people who used to live in Switzerland (legally or illegally) and are obliged to leave the country. A choice of case studies, based on an inventory of existing exclusion practices towards foreign nationals, will allow looking at those places where spatial exclusion is implemented, lived and contested. This includes, for example, border control at the external borders, in trains and at airports, administrative detention, as well as forceful removal. The study analyzes the practices and experiences of different actors involved in migration control such as immigrants undergoing exclusion procedures, officials in charge of different tasks related to immigration and staff working in specialized institutions.
Chercheur principal
Statut
Completed
Identifiant interne
31867
identifiant
2 Résultats
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- PublicationAccès libreShaping migration at the border: the entangled rationalities of border control practices(2021-2-18)This article analyses how border guards as members of a state organisation shape the movement of non-nationals into the territory of a nation state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the Swiss Border Guard (SBG), it explores the rationalities—understood as stabilised ways of reasoning and acting—that characterise practices within this state organisation. Combining organisational and structuration theory with a street-level bureaucracy perspective allows for a differentiated analysis of the various facets of border guards’ everyday work. Four rationalities of border-control practices are identified and compared: security, humanitarian, cost-calculation, and pragmatic rationality. I argue that, by considering both the specific goals and imperatives of border control and the characteristics of street-level bureaucrats acting within a state organisation, these entangled logics explain the complex and incoherent social reality of border control. More generally, the results contribute to organisational theory by pointing to the importance of taking into account that multiple entangled rationalities structure the practices of an organisation’s members.
- PublicationAccès libreBureaucracies Under Judicial Control? Relational Discretion in the Implementation of Immigration Detention in Swiss Cantons(2021-8-10)
; Based on interviews with bureaucrats and judges in several Swiss cantons, this article analyzes how bureaucrats decide to order immigration detention and how the judicial review shapes their decisions. The authors argue that discretionary decision-making regarding immigration detention is structured by the web of relationships in which decision-makers are embedded and affected by the practices of other street-level actors. The varying cantonal configurations result in heterogenous bureaucratic practices that affect the profiles and numbers of persons being detained. In particular, differences in judges’ interpretation of legal principles, as well as in their expectations, strongly affect bureaucratic decisions.