The Magic of Immigration Enforcement: Discretion, Order and Policing

Abstract

This chapter examines the peculiar nature of immigration decision-making. Removal and deportation are state coercive acts that require the acquiescence of another sovereign state and often involve complex bilateral negotiations by parties in asymmetrical relations of power. As such they are truly international acts that demand careful coordination and interdependence between various actors and institutions. They place immigration officers at the receiving end of a long chain that connects various institutional actors across public and private domains spanning the local, the national, and the global. The peculiarity of immigration enforcement relates to the framework in which officers exercise discretion: a framework structured around a combination of variables over which they have little or no control, a game of chance or a lottery. Officers figuratively gesture at the magical powers of immigration enforcement to solve policing problems. The notion of magic attests to the attractions of immigration powers for everyday policing, as well as the random, capricious, informal, and arbitrary ways in which state power operates. The fragile, ever-changing grounds on which immigration staff make decisions reflects the challenges of state power to spatialize its authority in a transnational world order. By examining the imbrications of state power and magic, this chapter argues that immigration enforcement casts doubt on the presumed rationality of state bureaucracy and authority, exposing its arbitrariness as well as its limits.