This article makes a conceptual and methodological argument for ethnographically studying a certain type of paperwork in immigration bureaucracies, namely internal administrative guidelines. Much ethnographic research has focused on case files, application forms, identity documents and judicial decisions attempting to shed light on bureaucrats’ discretionary power and migrants’ strategies of navigating immigration laws. This article shifts attention from bureaucrats’ discretionary practices to their efforts to standardise and codify their own practices. The administrative guidelines of the Foreigners’ Registration Office of Berlin and the visa guidelines of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany are examined as legal documents that are produced in a web of textually grounded legal meanings, as well as in a meshwork of social and political relations and in turn reconfigure both social relations and legal meanings. Contextualised in such a way, these administrative guidelines shed light not only on ‘immigration law at work’ but also on ‘immigration law in the making’.
Administrative guidelines as a source of immigration law?
Ethnographic perspectives on law at work and in the making
Larissa Vetters
In Journal of Legal Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 70–90
Re/Making Immigration Policy through Practice
How Social Workers Influence What It Means to Be a Refused Asylum Seeker
Kathryn Tomko Dennler
, tolerance, and hospitality as they seek to meet their needs and forge what Judith Butler calls “a livable life” (2004) . This article is animated by two interrelated questions: how does immigration status function in the everyday lives of refused asylum
A Clash of Civilizations?
Pegida and the Rise of Cultural Nationalism
David N. Coury
against the rise of “Eurabia” as a result of unchecked Muslim immigration. At the center of this argument, he writes, is first the claim that the political and ethical foundation of Western Europe lies in Christianity, and, second, that this tradition is
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 54–67
“China gives and China takes”
African traders and the nondocumenting states
Shanshan Lan
Africans traders are subjected to intensified immigration control by the Chinese authorities. Only a limited number of them manage to obtain long-term visas to conduct business in China. The African population in Guangzhou is extremely diverse, and almost
J. Cristobal Pizarro and Brendon M. H. Larson
.g., mobility and immigration) environment affect people’s connections with places ( Fresque-Baxter and Armitage 2012 ; Manzo and Devine-Wright 2014 ), and, if so, whether there might be more fruitful ways to conceive human-nature relationships in the
The “Brick and Mortar” of Mobilization?
Storytelling and Materiality in Anti-Asylum Seeker Center Protests in the Netherlands
Iris Beau Segers
individuals to an active participant in public life” (p. 69), this article conceptualizes anti-AZC mobilization as a specific form of anti-immigration mobilization. Concretely, anti-AZC mobilization refers to the organization of an aggregate of individuals
Paul Apostolidis
This essay considers whether legal rights remain a core resource for transforming the social situation of low-income workers in the United States. In particular, how does the recent expansion of the immigrant workforce in the US affect the prospects for workers to generate a symbiosis between legalist struggles and rank-and-file movement activism? I demonstrate that the migration narratives of Mexican immigrant union activists intervene in the law's formation of political subjects, such that the thorough disciplining of a docile subject by the law does not necessarily result from legalist activism. Instead, migration stories furnish alternative sources of identity that can mitigate these effects and spur the translation of legalist struggle into radical-democratic unionism. My analysis is based on interviews with immigrant workers who led a highly unusual movement of resistance from 1995-2005 at a large beef processing plant in Washington State.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 137–162
Kaoru Miyazawa
present, as well as to develop aspirations related to family, education, and career. This article examines how a young Jamaican girl, who immigrated to the United States after experiencing a teenage pregnancy and an abortion, participated in AOUM classes
Pierre Makhlouf
, deserving of hostility by ‘abusing our hospitality’. Alongside this perception is the charge that human rights campaigners have in the past suppressed discussion of immigration. In my experience, there has seldom been a time when immigration has not been
"Pseudo-Sousveillance"
(Re)imagining Immigration Narratives and Surveillance Practices by Experiencing "Use of Force"
Kellie Marin
This article introduces the concept of “pseudo-sousveillance” as simulated sousveillance practices created by the sensory environments of immersive technologies. To advance this concept, I analyze the virtual reality (VR) experience “Use of Force” that immerses participants within the scene of the night during which immigrant Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was beaten by border patrol officers at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. I argue that the pseudo-sousveillance practices of cellphone recording and surveillance from above enlist users to be active participants in resisting dominant surveillance practices by constructing alternative narratives about immigrant experiences, exposing the overreach of the border patrol, and revealing the limits of surveillance in immigration control. I then discuss the implications that pseudo-sousveillance has for rethinking the rhetorical power of emerging technologies and sousveillance in a surveillant age.
