Empathy, morality, and criminality
The legitimation narratives of U.S. Border Patrol agents
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7843869 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Irene I Vega (0000-0002-1608-5163, University of California, Irvine, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 15 |
| Pages | 2544-2561 |
| Publication date | 2018-11-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Community (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369183x.2017.1396888 |
| OpenAlex | W2767285510 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 45 |
| References cited | 59 |
Border enforcement is a morally ambiguous and politically contentious state practice. Frontline enforcers experience this contentiousness as a threat to their moral authority. This article draws on interviews with U.S. Border Patrol agents to examine their legitimation work, the justificatory narratives they deploy to establish their moral authority and legitimacy of the system they represent. Agents’ legitimation narratives centre on two strategies: disputing immigrants’ morality (i.e. ‘criminalisation’ and ‘uncertainty’) and establishing their own morality through compassionate discourses (‘caring control’). By helping agents resolve moral ambiguities and reputational issues, these narratives restore the legitimacy of the U.S. immigration control system. In turn, this legitimacy serves as the normative foundation for agents to continue with an uncritical performance of their professional mandates. While the narratives function similarly across agents’ social categories, Latinos cluster in the caring control narrative. This patterns reveals how legitimacy issues can be racialised, incentivising different legitimation strategies within the same organisation. Overall, this analysis provides a window into the normative principles that guide agents’ actions and shape migrants’ interactions with the coercive arm of the state
Art · Criminology · Empathy · Legitimation · Morality · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Psychology · Social Psychology
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Feeding migrants to cultivate a moral self
Unclaimed and unclaimable deaths
The affective economy of removal
Mobile spaces of control and moral geographies
Immigration bureaucracies and state-created categories across the globe
La combinación de la refronterización y la desfronterización en la configuración territorial. Un acercamiento desde la teoría de campos
Seeking Asylum
Becoming Bureaucrats
States Against Migrants
Legitimating Identities
Shedding Light on Police Culture
Can Businesses Effectively Regulate Employee Conduct? The Antecedents of Rule Following in Work Settings
Street-Level Bureaucracy
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Moral Emotions
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Border games
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The Legitimation of Power
Economy and Society
Embodying emotional dirty work
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Police legitimacy, ideology and qualitative methods
Techniques of legitimation
Migra
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Trust, Privilege, and Discretion in the Governance of the US Borderlands with Mexico
Processes of Legitimation
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The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border 1978-1992
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Ordinary people doing extraordinary things
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Penetrability of Administrative Systems
Legal Attitudes of Immigrant Detainees
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Who Is a Refugee? Political Subjectivity and the Categorisation of Somali Asylum Seekers in Sweden
Visa Officers as Gatekeepers of a State's Borders
These People Could Be Anyone
Moments of Humiliation, Intimidation and Implied 'Illegality
Controlling 'Unwanted' Immigration
Emotional Bureaucracies
Compassion and Repression
Police Academy Socialization
Legitimacy as a Social Process
Respect for outsiders? respect for the law? the moral evaluation of high scale issues by US immigration officers
Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure
Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy
Social effects of mass deportations by the United States government, 2000-10
| Unique citing works | 45 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 6,43 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 44 |