The interdependency of border bureaucracies and mobility intermediaries: a street level view of migration infrastructuring

Introduction

Following the interest of this special issue into the ways in which people migrate, most notably the meso-level actors and organisations that facilitate, shape, enable mobility aspirations, this article proposes a street-level view to analyse the ways in which mobility intermediaries respond to border bureaucracies. Border bureaucracies are sites whereby state apparatuses establish requirements aimed at ordering cross-border movements, determining identities and belongings, categorizing, granting rights or imposing sanctions. In the case of visa procedures, border bureaucracies are characterized by dayto-day interactions between the state, candidates to mobility, and intermediaries who sustain, in multiple manners, would-be migrants and travellers, by making profits out of licit/illicit, formal/informal activities. The street-level view sheds light on practices on the ground and allows consideration of the entanglement between actors, organisations, knowledge, and logics that both implement and respond to visa procedures. In doing so, this article engages with that call for seeing and thinking about migration in terms of ‘migration infrastructures’, meaning that the understanding of migratory dynamics shifts from migrant behaviours to broader societal developments most notably the spaces of mediation and interplay of multiple dimensions -commercial, regulatory, technological, humanitarian and social- which carry conflicting and colliding logic of operations (Xiang & Lindquist, 2014). Migrant mobilities are given significance and direction through the infrastructuring process (Lin et al., 2017). Responses to political features such as border bureaucracies affect the ways in which people are mobile.

Spaces of state and intermediaries’ mediation have been deservingly received analytical attention. Pollozek and Passoth (2019) have shed light on the interplay of actors, processes and practices of bureaucratic channelling that characterize the transnational control assemblage in the EU hotspots approach. As Zhang and Axelsson (2021) have noted, bureaucratic channelling takes account of the multiple sites where state and intermediary actors interact. Intermediaries co-produce regulatory spaces by shaping policy change and by setting the agenda, in the case of the regulation of labour migration (Axelsson et al., 2022). This article takes visa procedures as a case of bureaucratic spaces of mediation to question i) how dimensions and logics of migration infrastructuring processes interact at the street-level and ii) the effects of such dynamics on (im) mobilty. I aim at arguing that the analytical lenses of interdependency and mutual reinforcement between border bureaucracies and mobility intermediaries make sense of the infrastructuring process in day-to-day bureaucratic bordering. This analysis privileges the responses of intermediaries to policy practices, rather than focusing on how policy actors are impacted by migrants’ strategies. Migrants’ strategies constitute well documented starting points to analyse migratory processes in discussions about the Autonomy of Migration (De Genova et al., 2015; Mezzadra, 2011) and defined as practices of appropriations in the case of visa policies (Scheel, 2017).

Visa policies have a twofold objective namely filtering between desirable and undesirable forms of mobility, to spur certain flows while blocking others, considered to be security and migratory ‘risks’. By taking visas as the case for analysis, this article shows the entanglement of different logics of operations that develop in response to both the stemming and the soliciting of mobility while taking account not only of illicit/informal activities but also of licit/formal ones, including those authorized by legal texts.

This analysis builds on my own in-depth fieldwork research, carried out in the last 10 years, on the social and policy worlds that characterize the implementation of visa procedures, including the staff of three Schengen consulates (Belgium, Italy, France) and visa applicants in Morocco (Casablanca), intermediaries in Morocco and Italy. While conducting fieldwork, I have never concealed the nature of my research. I have explained my interest in the day-to-day implementation of visa policy both from the point of view of the state and visa applicants. While researching the strategies put in place to obtain visas, I have also documented illicit practices. Some of them have been overtly disclosed by research participants. Others were observed during fieldwork. To protect the identity of the research participants, I do not give details about locations and dates of research. Long-time immersion in the social and policy worlds of visas has allowed me to develop several contacts and to be perceived as part of that social landscape, therefore building the trust that should characterize the relationship with participants.

In this article, I aim at identifying and analysing larger patterns of micro-practices that are responding to official policies. Therefore, I compare the findings related to the contexts of my own research to ethnographic literature about other specific local contexts. Such a use of comparison allows consideration of similarities most notably in dynamics of interdependency that go beyond the specificities of local contexts, although the many differences and complexities that ethnographic research puts forward. This comparative approach, applied to ethnographic accounts that have studied implementation practices, strategies of visa applicants and the socio-economic activities that sustain applicants, hints at general themes about the ways in which the interplay of state/intermediaries’ practices shape mobility, without dismissing the fact that practices on the ground tend to be tailored to local contexts. The back-and-forth movement between data and analysis follows the lines of Grounded Theory Method (Bryant & Charmaz, 2008; Corbin & Strauss, 2008) which comprises a systematic, inductive, and comparative approach for conducting inquiry.

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