Heyman. Anthropology of Bureaucracy

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Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy: The Immigration and

Naturalization Service at the Mexico-United States Border

Josiah McC. Heyman

Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 2. (Apr., 1995), pp. 261-287.

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CURRENTNTHROPOLOGYolume 36 Number

2

April 1995

99

by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rlghts reserved

O O I I - ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ / ~ ~ O ~ - O O O I ~ . S O

Putting Power

in

the Anthropology

of Bureaucracy

The Immigration and

Naturalization Service at the

Mexico United States Border1

by Josiah McC. Heyman

The anthropology of bureaucracy should address the role of or-

ganized power in orchestrating complex and unequal societies.

This artic le reviews the development of bureaucracy studies,

focusing on the thinking done by bureaucrats i n their efforts

to control the actions of others. Then the central concept of

thought-work is placed within a series of queries about levels

and relationships of power, with particular at tention to the en-

compassing classifications and assumpt ions embodied i n organi-

zational worldviews. Th e worldviews of officers of the United

States Immigration and Naturalization Service, examined as a

case study, are found to give cohesion to a contradictory policy

that balances publicly visible arrests and invisible but effective

perpetuation of undocumented labor migration. Huma n rights

abuses and avoidance of abuses are both explainable as outcomes

of these thought-work routines. A stronger theoretical approach

to organized power enhances applied anthropology's abi lity to ad-

dress the behavior of st ate and private bureaucracies with respect

to the rights and interes ts of nonbureaucrats.

JO S IA H

M C C. HEYMAN

is Associate P~ O ~ ~ S S O If Anthropology

in the Department of Social Sciences of Michigan Technological

University 1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, Mich. 4993 1-1295,

U.S.A. [[email protected]]).Born in 1958, he was educated at

The Johns Hopkins University (B.A., 1980) and the City Univer-

sity of New York Graduate School (Ph.D., 1989). His research

interests are the Mexico-U.S. border, immigration and drug law

I .

The research was supported grants the

Frank

Guggenheim Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for An-

thropological Research. Previous versions of this paper were pre-

sented to the Departmen ts of Anthropology of t he University of

Arizona, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia Univer-

sity, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University.

For comments and conversations I thank Merlyn Heyman, Eric

Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Carlos VClez-Ibabez, Jim Greenberg, James

Carrier, Michael Kearney, Raul Fernandez, Leo Chavez, Peter Na-

bokov, my colleagues at Michigan Tech, attendees at the various

presentations, and anonymous referees. I thank many interviewees

inside and outside the INS who cannot be named. Friends in Agua

Prieta, Sonora, and Douglas, Arizona, continue to teach me about

border affairs.All responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation

remains my own.

enforcement, bureaucracies and power, and industrial working

classes. His publications include Li fe and Labor on the Border:

Wor king People of North eastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886-1986

(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 19911, The Emergence of

the Waged Life Course on the United States-Mexico Border

Ame rican Ethnologis t

I

7:348-5 91, The Organizational Logic of

Capitalist Consumption on the Mexico-United States Border

Re s e ar c h i n Ec o n o mi c An t h r o p o l o g y

I

175-2381, and In the

Shadow of the Smokestacks: Labor and Environmental Conflict

in a Company-Dominated Town, in

Art icula t ing Hidden His to-

r ies: Anthropology , His tory , and the In f luence o f Eric R. W ol f ,

edited by Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). The present

paper was submitted in final form 3 v 94.

The aim of an anthropology of bureaucracy should be

to analyze complex and unequal societies, all of which

contain bureaucracies. Concrete organizations employ

techniques of power for specific ends in contexts wider

than the bureaucracv itself. The analvsis of these tech-

niques is not, however, simply a matter of examining

explicit policy and other products of power holders, for

all too often official goals mystify the real application

of organized power. Techniques of power inhere in the

routines of bureaucratic workers and their relationships

with the persons they attempt to control. We thus

face a difficult but ideally thought-provoking interplay

between two levels of inquiry: directly observed bu-

reaucratic labors-the quintessential ly organizational

aspects of bureaucratized society-and the grand ques-

tions of societal constitution. The most revealing: con-

nections come from an examination of the bureaucratic

production process itself; here I propose that we study

bureaucratic thought-work-the routine production of

thoughts about and consequent actions aimed at the

control of the slippery, sometimes resistant, recipients

of organizational orders.

In order to show how the concept of thought-work

can be used to reveal organizational power, I here exam-

ine the United States Immigration and Naturalization

Service (INS)at the Mexico-United States border. The

INS is engaged in probably the world's largest effort to

control human movement. It arrests over I million per-

sons a year, yet paradoxically it facilitates the entry of

undocumented immigrant laborers into the U.S. econ-

omy. Precisely because U.S. immigration policy is con-

tradictory, it ' requires subtle p id an ce and coherent

thought-work. I therefore focus on the most fundamen-

tal level of thought-work~ NS officer worldviews-the

basic, organizationally shared assumptions about rela-

tionships between self and various others. Since INS

worldviews undergird the attitudes toward im-

they

inform

us

the Occurrence and

avoidance of human rights abuses on the Mexico-U.S.

border. Worldviews neither encompass every feature of

INS

thought-work nor engage all the questions relevant

to explaining immigration law enforcementin advanced

capitalist societies, but they do const itute a challenging

and revealing topic of inquiry.


3/28

262

C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y

Volume

36,

Number

2

pril

995

Toward an Anthropology of Bureaucracies

The complexity of complex societies has posed difficult

though fruitful problems for cultural anthropologists

and archaeologists. One response has been to widen the

range of relevant processes to include global history,

economy, and polity while retaining the perspective of

the local setting. We might call this the local-contextual

view. Bureaucracies, however, interest us precisely be-

cause they orchestrate numerous local contexts at once

(Wolf 1990). Power makes context st ick, and bureaucra-

cies are the preeminent technology of power in th e con-

temporary world. There is no better place to witness the

applications and limits of power than th e US.-Mexico

border. At this boundary, for example, the media-visible

INS legally distinguishes mostly Spanish-speaking un-

documented immigrants from the imagined community

of U.S. citizens (see Chavez 19oz:16-zol. It is therefore

fundamental to 'th e creation i ethnic iontexts in the

United States today. Anthropological attention to bu-

reaucratic Dower, then, redirects the debates between

introspection and the study of others toward the study

of social orders that bind differentiated wholes together.2

Max Weber shaped the study of bureaucracies by pos-

iting a series of characteristics of an ideal rational

bureaucracy-a firmly ordered hierarchy of offices,

delimited jurisdictions for those offices, exclusion of ir-

relevant tasks and interests, and so forth (Gerth and

Mills 1946: 196-204). Weber's typology of rational ad-

ministration is taken to stand by itself, but it should not

be: it was Dart of his discussion of the modernization

of societal power. Although he recognized bureaucratic

elements in precapitalist or non-Western societies, he

used the perfection of rat ional bureaucracy to demon-

strate the shift from indirect rule by elites, whether pat-

rimonial or prebendal, toward capitalism and mass party

polities (pp.204-16). For example, he distinguished rule

by notables, compromised by their many roles in soci-

ety, from rule by disinterested bureaucrats (pp,210-1 I .

The point here is not whether Weber's assertions are

adequate but tha t he focused on internal aspects of bu-

reaucracy within a very broad context.

Weber's typology set the stage, however, for a nar-

rowing of the study of organizations. Becoming an issue

in itself, it joined the still more restrictive managerial

interest in diagnosing administrative forms in order to

control them (see Fischer and Sirianni 1984). will forgo

a review of the vast sociology of bureaucracy (see Per-

row 1986). I note, however, tha t in sociology very so-

~histicatedand fine-grained studies of bureaucracies

emerged-in a sense making the best of a bad situa-

tion-from thi s problematic narrowing of focus, ad-

dressing, for example, social systems within (and often

resistant to) rational work structure (Gouldner 1954) or

the experiential consequences of laboring in a bureau-

cracy (Crozier 1971, Jackal1 1978).A few works, such as

z I have been much influenced in this passage by the contributors

to Fox [ r g g r ) ,especially on the question how anthropology might

escape what Troui llot 1991) calls the primitive slot.

Perrow's (1984) study of normal accidents and Jack-

all's (1988) study of major corporate managers' moral

rules-in-use, link the internal forms and relations of

bureaucracy with societal issues of the first order. How-

ever, as Perrow (1986:5)writes, societal scientis ts have,

unt il recently, avoided the 'big' question of unregulated

and unperceived power through bureaucratic organiza-

tions, even though the research that has been done

points in this direction.

Anthropology has arrived late on the scene in the

study of bureaucracies. Th e main motivation for anthro-

pologists to study bureaucracy seems to be the micro-

scopic or ethnographic encounter. The other major

tradition in anthropology, the broad sweep of human

history and its component social orders, seems relatively

isolated from the ethnographic impulse of anthropolo-

gists to observe bureaucracies at work. The program de-

veloped by Britan and Cohen (1980:14-20), for example,

inverts Weber's Eurocentric modernism, favoring an-

thropology's role in cross-cultural studies of bureaucracy

or, within the core, in the study of the informal and

interstitial. Britan and Cohen (1980:23, 26) intermit-

tently mention power and inequality, but they never in-

tegrate them into the comparative research agendae3

Schwartzman (1993) develops a stronger ethnographic

approach to th e interior life of organizations. Drawing

on recent work in sociology and social psychology, she

discards the idea that the charted organization is in some

way distinct from and prior to the interactions of per-

sons in the organizational work process; she argues that

the interactions are the organization and emphasizes

conflict, negotiation, and change. However, she goes on

to define a troublesome direction of inquiry for the eth -

nography of bureaucracies (p. 7 I ) :

Meetings have generally been the background struc-

ture for examining and assessing what are assumed

to be the

really

important matters of organizational

life, for example, power, decisions, ideology, and con-

flict. In this book [Schwartzman 19891 these con-

cepts become the background structures for exam-

ining the significance of specific meetings at th e

Center, and these meetings are used in tu rn to cri-

tique these standard concepts.

Although she calls for macro-micro linkage (pp. 37, 71),

she lacks a strategic conception of how to forge such

connections. Ultimately (p. 45) she dismisses t he frus-

trating macro-micro dichotomy in favor of a call for in-

quiry into the small cultural worlds of the powerful and

the powerless. What would the end product of such a

study be? Despite the quotation's final qualifying clause,

Schwartzman's program points to a portrait of an organi-

zational lifeway as isolated as th e most isolated ethnog-

raphy.

Handelman (1981)and Herzfeld (1992)write about bu-

reaucracy in the anthropological tradit ion of analyzing

broad orders of conceptualization rather than adopting

3

This is particularly disappointing in view of Cohen's anthropo-

logical interest in the broad sweep of human history and politics.


4/28

H E Y M N

the narrower post-Weberian focus on organizational

work. Each in his way views bureaucracy as the enact-

me nt of a particular mode of tho ught. Han delm an (1981:

6-11) considers sys tem atic taxo nom izatio n (d ivisio n of

complex w holes int o exclusive categories) and t he rank-

ing of taxa e ssent ial features of bureau cracy an d sees

this m anne r of th ough t as distinctive of t he Renaissance

and modern Wes t. Herz fe ld ( ~ g g z :~ g - z o ) bu -roots

reaucracy in a symbolic distinction he perceives as Ju-

deo-Christian or Indo-European: persons are reduced to

essential categories of insider versus outsider, and the

latter are excluded from norm s of ho spitality. ( Th is ex-

clusion accoun ts for bureaucratic rudeness, wh ich Herz-

feld labels indifference. )

Bureaucratic thought, however, emerges in a particu-

lar institutional work context. Taxonomy, hierarchy,

and reduction of complex ity to essences are widely

shared features of hu m an tho ught. T he question is how

they are generated in bureaucratic workers' minds

with in a particular job setting-what th e political and

econom ic rationale is for having large masses of workers

think in such formats about concrete topics such as

rights to entry and citizenship. Although Handelman

and Herzfeld qualify their stanc e wit h calls for the stud y

of b ureaucratic power i n operation (see Handelm an and

Leyton 1978))both ultimately see bureaucratic institu-

tions a nd societies as arising from a Hegelian idea play-

ing itself o ut throug h history. I advocate asking instead

how characteristic ideas are produced and reproduced in

societal-historical contexts.

The attribution of bureaucratic thought to Western

cultural history is likewise troublesome; Chinese reli-

gion, for example, very clearly demonstrates bureau-

cratic ideas (Ahern 1981) in keeping wi th the actual bu-

reaucratic organization of th e Chin ese state. Herzfeld

seeks to avoid dividing ideal-typic rational bureaucracy

from th e rest of symbolically negotiated life, but i n so

doing he reifies Western culture in a man ner that Carrier

(1992) has perceptively term ed Occidentalism. Th e

history of states clearly demonstrates tha t bureaucracy

is often found in highly centralized economies, militar-

ies, and polities.

I seek to synthesize bureaucratic thought and bureau-

cratic work in approaching bureaucracies as an object

of study. However, we m us t no t confuse th e mean s of

our study, bureaucracy as

object

with the agenda for

the study. There may be times wh en understanding one

organization or se t of or ganiz ation s is sufficient as an

objective

of s tu dy in a larger resea rch pro cess. If w e are

to understand how bureaucracies help orchestrate com-

plex and unequal societies, we must retain a sense of

mo vem ent from the interior of organizations to what

Perrow calls th e 'big' question of unregulated and un -

perceived power (als osee Nader 972, 198 0)~nd there-

fore I employ a discovery framework that begins with

the unification of w ork and th ough t on th e job and pro-

ceeds to a n exam ination of a series of conte xts to high-

light likely power relationships.

Bureaucracies are hierarchical organizations designed

to force the production of thoughts as a work duty.

Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy

263

Thought-work occurs under regulated and monitored

circumstancesi it is distinct from the au tonomous con-

templation, memorization, or recitation involved in

other systems of conceptual p ro d ~ c ti o n .~hought-work

is required of an y atte m pt t o contro l th e behavior of

other hum an beings because those h um an beings have

their own wills and motiv ations and the ir responses can-

not be entirely an ticipated by instruc tions (Lipsky 1980:

I S ) . However, no t all control relations are bureaucratic.

Bureaucratic thought-work occurs when a detailed divi-

sion of labor partia lly routin izes the man ufact ure of

thoughts. In turn, this detailed division of labor occurs

only when the bureaucrat encounters the controlled

party in a single-stranded vertical relationship, thou gh

in practice th e addition of stra nds is of in tere st. Bureau-

cracy, as Weber pointed out, works differently from

multistranded vertical relationships between, say, re-

gional elites and local populaces.5 State workers, such

as police, social benefits workers, or immigration in-

spectors, atte mp t to control persons outside of th e orga-

nization. Other bureaucrats, for example, in production

corporations or universities, attempt to control organi-

zation members w ho work directly at th e point of pro-

duction (just as teaching faculty, adjuncts, and teaching

assistants do when they meet courses and produce

grade^ .^ Furthermore, bureaucrats are required to con-

trol other bureaucrats. Bureaucratic thought-work thus

locates an inevitable struggle: bureaucratic workers

mu st thi nk for themselves because of th e nature of the ir

tasks, yet they must be controlled as thinkers in order

to ensure th e regular production of control duties .

Th e notio n of th ough t-wo rk gives a Marxian slant,

then, to a Weberian theme. It emphasizes that social

relationships have to be produced. It suggests that inte r-

nal characteristics such as Schwartzman's negotiations

or Handelman's taxa reveal much about the external

relationships between controllers and the controlled.

Thought-work is th us m ore pointed th an organizational

processes or organizational cultures. Bringing the con-

cept of power t o stud ies of bureauc racies is and und oub t-

4. Eickelman (1978)discusses traditional Islamic learning in a m an-

ner that usefully contrasts with bureaucratic thought-work. He

likewise employ s th e idea tha t specific modes of thoug ht-work, in

this case the ability to converse in quotations from the Koran,

produce social relation ships of a partic ular order.

5

Here, of course, I follow Weber's distinc tion betw een bureau -

cratic auth ority and patrimonial or othe r types of auth ority.

Whereas Weber tends to characterize bureaucracy in term s of its

intern al characteristics, however, I emphasize the relationship be-

tween th e bureaucrat and the recipient of control. I am much in-

fluenced by Elliot Leyton's (H and elma n and Leyton 1978) descrip-

tion of th e incongruities of patronage and bureau cratic power in

Newfoundland.

I

draw my vocabulary from Wolf (1966:89-91),

who addresses the changing relationship of peasant classes to the

larger social order, including bureaucratization as a vertical and

single-stranded relationship.

6 My idea of tho ugh t-work draws inspiratio n from th e radical liter-

atu re on workplaces, esp ecially Buraw oy's (197 9) analy sis of bu-

reaucratic control arising in manufacturing situations where w ork-

ers retain, within limits, skill and pace discretion.


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264 CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 36 Number

2

April

1995

edly will c ontin ue to be mo re challenging th an bringing

th e concept of cu lture to them .'

The first inquiry involves the thought process itself.

The bureaucracy literature is replete with perceptive

studies on, for example, th e processual approach to case

and rule interpretation (Handelm an and Leyton

I

978),

th e concept of organiza tional horizons to tho ught (E mer-

son and Paley 19 92) ~nd political learning by experience

and subsequent anticipatory decision making (Gilboy

1991, 1992).These and o ther studies have demonstrated

that thought-wo rk is rarely th e mechanical application

of rules but rather consists of learning and pattern-

following conducted sim ultaneously a t mu ltiple levels.

( Ishall focus on th e mo st com prehensive level, organiza-

tional worldviews.) Th e fact that bureaucratic thoug ht

proves richly contextual rather than abstractly rational

turns our attention to the context itself, the organiza-

tional workplace. Furthermore, thought-work is more

tha n purely functional, since t he tools of bureaucracy

are sentient persons who develop logical elaborations,

rationales, and critiques rooted in job struggles. Obser-

vations on thought, then, can be used to characterize the

society, polity, and econom y th at have produced specific

thinking situations.

Thought-work, secondly, draws our attention to the

existence and actions of thought-wo rkers in a m anner

that bureaucracy as reified conceptualization does not.

Lipsky (1980)delineates, for example, the layer of str eet -

level bureaucrats-teach ers, casework ers, and police of-

ficers-who deal directly w ith th e nonbureauc ratic sub-

ject population (as opposed to those bureaucrats w ho

address th e contro l of th e tie r of burea ucra tic producers

below them ).He demonstra tes that the d is t inct ive work

routines an d interes ts of street-leve l bureaucrats ca use

workplace conflicts both w ith m anagers and with non-

bureaucrats. It therefore behooves us to place street-

level bureaucrats in a disti nctiv e sequence of power rela-

tions.

Street-level bureaucrats struggle wi th th eir managers

in terms of power through the organization, yet they

also share much with their managers. Many managers

climb up through the ranks and share thought frame-

works w ith the people they supervise. Manager-worker

relations are inher ently conflictive, but, as Lipsky (1980:

2 5 ) says, managers depend an their subordinates to im -

plement policies in such a way as to reward them or at

least not draw negative attentio n; managers and workers

therefore reach a ten se balance of int ere sts .

I

follow

Schwa rtzman in noticing th e conversation of argu me nts

and agreements between street-level INS workers and

managers represented in th e INS thought framew ork.

Yet power inside the organization is not enough. We

sense the play of power ab ove th e bureaucracies th at we

study. The literature on states debates who controls

st ate agencies-specific power elites, broader coali tions

7. Baba (198 9) effectively reviews th e possibilities and limita tions

of th e concept of o rganizational cu lture and po ints to the role of

power, especially in recasting official organizationa l cultures as

manag erial ideologies.

in the political economy, or autonomous interests in

th e upper reaches of th e state. Thi s literature reflects,

however, an awareness that a distinctly political layer

sets major agendas for bureaucracy, in Weber's te rm s the

ins tru me nt of power (G erth and Mills 1946:228; Wright

1978:181-22s Foley and Yambert 1989). Th us it is less

important for bureaucracy studies tha t w e resolve this

debate than that we induce from subtle, even hidden,

evidence the operation of politics and th e predetermina-

tion of t he work do ne by bureaucracies by funda me ntal

decisions, emphases, and budgets. Exploring wh at a bu-

reaucracy does rather than explicit policy is a valuable

way of le arnin g abou t power holders, wh o rarely reveal

their hands. Lipsky, for example, organizes his book

around the idea that street-level bureaucrats frustrate

overt public goals in response to work conditions such

as over wh elm ing caseloads, shorta ge of resources, an d

th e need for self-protection and protection of labor-

m a r k e t p o s i t i o n ( 1 9 8 0 : ~ ~ ) .owever, as Perrow (1986:

263) writes, we should always exam ine th e possibility

tha t organizational m asters prefer unofficial goals over

official ones and may even m ake sure th at official goals

are not achieved.

Street-level bureaucrats attem pt to carry o ut power

decisions in th e fac e of nonbureaucratic populations.

The assum ption of a control bureaucracy is tha t the sub-

ject popu lation is subord inate, th e recip ient of actions,

but anthropologists have found th at nonbureaucrats of-

ten take the initiative by pursuing goals that bypass of-

ficial control (Skalnik 1989). Street-level bureaucrats

and nonbureaucrats struggle using complex thoug ht pro-

cesses about ea ch other. The se models of o pposition and

relationship, unli ke th ose deployed inside organizations,

may invo lve radically differing assum ption s about social

action and legitimacy (Handelm an and Leyton 1978).

However partial their control and incomplete their un -

derstanding of nonbureaucrats, street-level bureaucrats

retain th e effective force of th e sta te or private employ er

to mak e their thoughts i nto realities.

If

thoug ht-w ork is t he core of a production process,

then w hat is bureaucracies ' product? Simply posing this

question forces us to co nfront bureaucratic power in so-

ciety. Bureaucracies operate on two levels. Street-level

bureaucrats perform actual functions. Yet bureaucracy

as a form projects an au ra of fina lity, completenes s, and

inhum an objectivity (w hat Philip Abrams [1988] term s

th e state idea ) over empirically complex and often

highly biased

result^ ^

Ethnography shatters the hard

8

Th e illusion of bureau cratic perfection and t he ideology of ratio-

nality m ay emerge in part as a by-product of bureauc ratic work

processes, especially through the brief glimpses that nonbureau-

crats receive whe n they ob tain th e end products of th e organiza-

tion's work. Bureaucratic work is internally conflictive but ap-

pears, in the single-stranded relationship to the exterior, to be

definitive (since t is the final result, not th e midpoint, of struggles

and routines) and rational (since any position in the struggles and

routines will always utilize one among many possible modes of

linkage to explicit w ritte n con trol rules.) The re are, of course,

many other ways in which recent societies try to inculcate the

bureaucratic state idea. Th is one, however, con trasts remarkably


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H E Y M N

Putting Power in the nthropology o f Bureaucracy

2 6 5

surface of officiality; indeed , for all th e recent q ues-

tioning of ethnography,

I

can hardly think of a metho d

more inclined to penetrate formalism in the study of

power.

Th e notion of th oug ht-w ork is no t simply a way of

saying that bureaucrats do conceptual chores on behalf

of e xplicit and official mand ates ( no m atte r how awa re

of in terest a nd power w e ma y be). Because of i ts my s-

tifying qualities, societal production can be discerned

only when we tack b etween inte rnal work struggles and

external work accomplishments, seeking the power re-

sults-the regularly recurring patte rns of actio n and in-

action-of specific bure auc racie s or clus ters of bur eau -

cracies. Does th e organization avoid certain issues while

routinely excelling with regard to others? Can we locate

this mo bilization of bias (Schattsch neider 1960, cited

in Lukes 1974:16) wit hin a patterned com bina tion of

overarching political decisions, resource levels, internal

organizational negotiations, and the resistances and ac-

quiescences of sub ject pop ulatio ns? Repe titious or m u -

tating power results are the building blocks for the ongo-

ing construction of unequal societies; identifying them

and their determinants is the central task for students

of bureaucracy.

Th e idea of t hou ght-w ork is no t helpful whe n reified

as an abstract de finition of bureaucracy. It is helpful

wh en it delinea tes a sequence of inqu iries following

from a view of bureaucracies as workplaces involved in

th e production of con trol, each inquiry being an open

box awaiting historical specification. T he though t-work

concept is thus amenable to contextualization for bu-

reaucracies of quit e different natures, places, and ti m e s9

I t i s a f ramework whose tes t i s i t s ut i l i ty rather than i ts

universality.

wit h the mode s of legitim ation and mystification required for

multistranded patrimonial or other control relationships in wh ich

the two parties know considerably more about each other.

9. I am qu ite concerned about th e portability of thi s framework,

especially from a well-funded agency of a core state whose c ontrol

operations are reasonably clear to b ureaucracies in weaker stat es.

In the latter, the nation-state bureaucracy form has been adopted,

but the a ctions of bureauc rats may differ radically from formal

objectives (Migdal 1988). Likewise, we w itness th e superimpo si-

tion of formal corporate forms o n family-based capitalism. I hope,

in fact, that my framework will guide us i n useful directions. If w e

can discover a real INS immigration policy only in the tho ught-

work-laden job struggles of INS em ployees, the same framework

may prove useful in situations wh ere the relationship of bureau-

cratic behavior an d formal goals is completely obscu re. We mu st,

however, abandon the idea tha t th e analytically informative power

results are th e overt power objectives of th e organiza tion or, if th e

organization fails to do wha t it sets out to do, that its bureaucrats

accomplish nothing. Among other factors, we mu st pay atte n-

tion to th e struggles of bureaucrats w ith non bureaucrats in specific

historical and cultura l contexts, to th e class position of bureau-

cratic workers in specific societies, to the a ctual co ntent of daily

work (looking into and going beyond observations on t he absence

of wo rk inside so me organizations), and to th e work process as a

thought-generator operating with culturally available knowledges

and modes of learning. Migdal's (1988238-58) discussion of the

real work of weak state implementors dem onstra tes man y of

these inquiries, while Eickelman 's (1988)study of th e Om ani intel-

ligence service traces a core state form in the real political world

of o ne Arab Gulf state .

Bureaucratic Worldviews Methods

of Approach

worldview is a set of fun dam ental assum ptions about

th e nature of being and com prehen sible forms of ac tion

and relationship in the human and physical universe

(Kearney 1984). It is pervasive rathe r th an narrow ly

applicable; it guides more specific understandings.

worldview is required for thought-work. The bureau-

cratic control of h um ans involves complexity and un -

predictabili ty that translate in to discretion on the part of

th e officer. While ex pert knowledge suffices for routine

tasks, the variab ility of s ituatio ns requires general

guidelines. Worldview directs thought-work such as

case interpretation. Therefore organizational worldview

fosters th e sub tle coheren ce of decisions over a wide

variety of cases.1

However, the intelle ctua l processes pf bureau crats in-

evitably transcend the purely functional. First, as Kear-

ney (1984) notes, w orldview s strain to ward logico-

structural integration; people tend to think them

through to completion. This may produce skepticism

with regard to contradictory elements in the bureau-

cratic work situation, but bureaucrats affirm organi-

zational assumptions as they launch their crit icisms.

Furthermore, much of what emerges during logical

contem plation is in fact second-order rationalization of

polit ically and economically ordered work routines.

This results in reflective sta tem ents that, wh ile not nec-

essarily l i teral truth, do reveal the settled end point

of k ey organ izational struggles from t he p erspective

of street-level wo rkers. Lipsky (198o :xiii) perceptively

write s of experienced bureau crats, Com prom ises in

work h abits and atti tudes are rationalized as reflecting

worke rs' greater ma turity , the ir appreciation of practical

and political realities, or their mo re realistic assessment

of th e na tur e of the ~ ro b le m . ut these rationalizations

only summ arize the prevailing structural constraints on

hum an service bureaucracies . They are not t rue in a n

absolute sense. Nevertheless, the contemplative and

second-order aspects of worldviews do influence a ction

on the world; the y reinforce the sta nce of street-level

bureaucrats when facing their managers and, especially,

nonbureaucratic populations.

Th e analysis of bu reaucratic w orldview s offered here

has tw o parts: analysis of individ ual interviews

10. Orga nizatio nal worldv iew is, of course, part of the broad soci -

etal worldviews from which members were recruited. This helps

explain struggles between dominant-group-origin bureaucrats and

subordinate populations of very different origins and t he disparity

between th e powerful assum ption s of societal worldview and the

realities of highly sup ervised and co nstrained b ureaucratic jobs.

11. Th e INS fieldwork was conducted from D ecember 1991 to Ju ne

199%.On e hundred and four intervie ws were carried out wi th offi-

cers and managers of sev en operational branches of t he INS in two

regions on th e Mexican border: San Diego County, California, the

highest-volume legal and undocumented crossing area, and south-

ern Arizona, a lower-volume entry zone but one deeply involved in

drug interdic tion. The selection of interviewees w as opportunistic;

however, the distribution of interviews closely matches the sex

and race comp osition of officers in th e INS Western Region, con-


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266

C U R R E N T

A N T H R O P O L O G Y

Volume

36,

Nu mb e r

2,

April

995

through worldview categorization and analysis of con-

tex ts of le arnin g. In categorizing worldview s, I use Kear-

ney's (1984) seven universals: self, ot her (s), elationship

and causality (a ssum ed direction of action, from self t o

other or other to self), i me , space (especially th e bound-

ary area), and classification (w ith emphas es on citizen-

ship, nationality, and la w) . Rather t han force artificial

consistency on individual conversations,

I

also utilize

Strauss's (1990) classification of mut ual ly con tradic tory

propositions in interviews.12 Th e co ntext s for learning

bureaucratic worldviews are identified in Leyton's study

of th e Workmen's Com pensation Board (WCB) n New-

foundland (quoted by Han delman and Leyton 1978:84):

The particular ideology which provides moral imper-

atives and constrains a ction on t he part of t he WCB

is a distinct ive blen d of a rigidly codified set of regu-

lati ons of a recog nition of th e finan cial resp onsi-

bility of t he WCB to indus try, of an uncoo rdina ted

melange of philosophical and po litical ideas garnered

during the l ifetim e of th e officials, and of th e morals

firmed by INS affirmative action statistics for the specific ranks.

Although I obtained INS permission to conduct interviews and in

some cases managers suggested interviewee names, th ere was little

deliberate managerial guidance of interviews; several times

I

was

directed to speak w ith artic ulate in-hou se critics, and remarks were

remarkably candid thro ughou t. In addition, I observed routine INS

operations, including those remarked on by informants here, and

interviewed persons outside the INS including lawyers and other

immigration advocates in order to double-check statemen ts made

by INS employees.

Interviews had a uniform structure: they included inquiries on

personal background, recruitment into the INS, training, and a

chronological career history with questions about work settings

and job duties. T his interv iew form at allowed, however, for open-

ended elaboration and questioning as the exchange developed.

In-

terviews were hand-recorded nearly verbatim at th e time of th e

interview. The interview was closed by asking all informants to

free-associate on terms intended to reveal concepts of self and

other: INS, aliens, Mexico, Am erican public, Ame rican

politicians, accomplishm ents, and frustrations. The inter-

views were then coded in terms of worldview universals drawn

from Keamey (19841, read quali tatively for the particular conte nt

of th e universals and their gestalt, and summ arized . Rather tha n

aggregate these summaries, I here present selected interviews at

sufficient length to develop the personal conte xts and gestalts of

individuals. I have c hosen no t to represent a fictitious average INS

agent by selecting examples that seem to support my overall im-

pression; rather, I have deliberately selected intervie ws for diver-

sity of worldview gestalts and political opinions and the n looked

for commonalities. In selec ting interviews I have also represented

the div ersity of gender, race, rank, and INS career-sta rting date.

Because of the m ulti tude of work d uties in t he INS, I have re-

stricted m yself to describing two major c ont ext s of law enforce-

me nt at th e Mexican boundary itself: Border Patrol line watch and

port-of-entry inspection.

2 Strauss (1990) ontrasts learned ideological propositions, which

take the form of conte xt-inva riant, formulaic statem ents, with

more loosely linked thoughts arising from the contemplation of

particu lar con texts. Inform ants m ove towa rd one of thr ee types of

resolutions: vertical containment choosing a n ideological schema

over implicit alternatives;

horizontal containment

isolating con-

tradictory alternatives; and integration a nested resolution of all

layers of thou ght. Th e different types of resolutio n result i n more

rigid or more conte xtual thought-guides to action, a con sideration

of great importa nce for a stud y of burea ucratic conflic ts wi th non-

bureaucratic populations.

learned from the exchange of difficult or illustrativ e

cases betwee n officials. The WCB bureaucrat learns

these ideological cons traint s in no particularly pro-

grammed fashion; rather, he brings to the WCB his

personal ideas, reads th e Act u ntil its stipulations

are clear to him, and then absorbs as much as he can

of

WCB

philosophy and case histories as he moves

through th e organization.

The contexts to which Leyton points can be summa-

rized as re cruitm ent, traini ng (or reading), and organiza-

tional socialization. More imp ortant, he indicates tha t

bureaucrats learn and test subtle compromises with the

political economy.

The INS: Servant of Decisions from Above

To perceive power above the INS, we m us t contrast its

formal missions with the real policies it implements.

The INS, a long with the State Department and the De-

partm ent of Labor, issues visas to new legal immig rants

and nonimmigrant visitors. It inspects all persons-

citizens, imm igrants, and visitors-for admission at air,

sea, and land ports of entry. Enforcement of the immi-

gration laws is it s responsibility. Th e Border Patrol, its

uniformed police branch, prevents undocu mented entry

along the land border be tween p orts of e ntry, Inspections

polices th e ports of e ntry, an d several INS branche s oper-

ate in th e interior of the country and enforce laws such

as those against hiring undocumented aliens or aliens

working outsid e the terms of the ir visas. Arrestees may

be deported after an administrative trial in which the

INS serves as initial bond setter, jailer, and prosecutor

before an immigration judge who belongs to a separate

branch of t he D eparm ent of Justice, the Executive Office

of Im migration Review. Tho se denied admission at ports

of e ntry or detained at sea go through an adm inistra tive

hearing called exclusion involving yet narrower proce-

dural rights. The assump tion of the law is that deporta-

tion or exclusion will be enforced uniformly against

equivalent violators whatever their nationality; since

th e INS has never been given the budgets or mandates to

permit this, unstated policies guide actual enforcement

choices.

The INS implements three tacit policies. Voluntary

departure is an alternative to formal deportation, em-

ployed especially at the Mexican border, whereby ar-

rested aliens are perm itted (ind eed, encouraged) o waive

their rights to a deportation hearing and return to Mex-

ico without lengthy detention, expensive bonding, and

trial (seeWest and Moore 1989).In 1989 th e INS released

87% of those apprehended, 830,s

6

persons, for volun-

tary departure. Three percent of im mig ration offenders

were deportedj the remainder entered the legal process

but did not leave the coun try (U.S. INS 19go:1I

I .

Most

enforcement is directed against Mexicans rather than

other undocum ented entr ants. Ninety -one percent of de-

portable aliens apprehended by the INS in 1989 were

Mexicans

U.S.

INS 19go:11z), although approximately


8/28

H E Y M N Puttin g Power in th e Anthropology of Bureaucracy 267

42% of und ocum ented aliens in the Unite d States are

non-M exican (Woodrow and Passel 1990:48). Since these

undocumented aliens are released into Mexico at the

U.S. border, they can and do repeat their attempts to

evade border enforcement until they finally succeed in

entering (E spenshade 1990). In accordance w ith this pol-

icy the U.S. government at once arrests many persons,

thereby reinforcing the s tate idea of bounded citizenship

(em phas izing sym bols of border control ) for med ia

sale and consu mp tion (see Fernandez and Pedroza 1982,

Cornel ius 1982)~nd negates the effectiveness of these

arrests, thu s perm itting labor migration in numbe rs well

beyond tho se permitted by law (se e Bustam ante 1978).13

This combination of formal and tacit policies will be

called the voluntary-departure complex.

Differentiation by nationality is the second tacit pol-

icy. Th e principal me chan ism of th is is unequal as ylum

admissions rooted i n U.S. foreign policy history (S tepick

1982, Loescher and Scanlan 986) . Pedraza-Bailey (1985)

demonstrates that easy undocumented entry for Mexi-

cans contributes t o their placemen t i n th e proletariat of

the U.S. West, whereas asylum admission and subsidies

for Cubans have aided their upward m obility. Differenti-

ation by nationality on th e U.S.-Mexico border involves

primarily Mexicans and Central Americans, the latter

being discouraged from filing asylum papers by lengthy

detention, pressure t o depart voluntarily ( th us abandon-

ing the possibi lity of a syl um ), and, if a pplica tions are

made, low success rates (Koulish 1992).

Finally, th e INS has entered t he heavily funded realm

of narcotics law enforceme nt. Th e Border Patrol has pri-

mary respo nsibility for the in terdic tion of land border

smuggling between ports of entry ; at such ports, Cus-

tom s has primary responsibility, b ut INS inspectors are

cross-designated as C ust om s officers. INS Inve stigations

is deeply involved in inter-federal-agency operations

involving narcotics. The INS actively seeks and de-

ports permanent-resident and undocumented-alien fel-

ons finishing jail senten ces (Kesselbrenner and Rosen-

berg 1991).

Questions for the

NS

Worldview

It is not difficult to dem onstra te the role of regional and

sectoral economic interest s in the creation of a permis-

sive policy tow ard M exican labor (Portes and W alton

198 I: 5 3-5 8). Th e idea of thoug ht-w ork perm its us to

probe how t his policy is implem ented i n th e face of os-

tensibly contrary purposes.14 INS budgets benefit from

13. I cannot d iscuss at leng th th e politics of d e facto U.S. undocu -

mented im migration policy, but generally I locate it in the sim ulta-

neous prod uction of appearance an d reality as described here; see,

for example, Calavita's (1990) application of th e notion of sym-

bolic law to INS enforcemen t of employer sanctions.

14. Calavita (19 92)shows how economic interests have penetrated

th eIN S but only for the bracero contract-labor period prior to 1965.

Harwood (19 86) provides a reliable survey of INS en forcement in

the undocumented immigration period, but it is written from a

politically conservative viewpoint that does not unde rtake to ex-

plore this issue.

low-cost, ineffectual but politically visible arrests of

Mexicans near t he border. INS managers therefore need

to implement this strategy despite the fact that their

subordinates believe i n enforcing th e im migration law

effectively, which means going after higher-cost offend-

ers such as alien smugglers. Th e result of this struggle

with in the rank s of t he INS is, as we sh all see, the pro-

ductio n of th e voluntary-departure com plex on a daily

basis. A coheren t worldview renders de facto policy con-

trollable and predictable; it s tenets can be taught to co-

horts of new officers with out overtly contradicting offi-

cial statem ents.

In this process, of course , INS officers intera ct wit h an

undocumented immigrant population that deliberately

tries to avoid and defy state auth ority. Recently, narcot-

ics law enforcement has increased the firepower avail-

able to INS officers and altered th e calcu lation of risks .

How do INS officers deal with defiance and frustration

in terms of their worldviews' as sum ption s about the na-

ture of social action and th e characteristics of im mi -

grants as others ? What do INS worldviews tell u s about

abusive and abuse-avoiding behaviors (Am erican Friends

Service Committee 1990, 1992; Americas Watch 1992,

1993; Petition to the Inter-American Commission

1992)?15

INS

Worldviews

ORG NIZ T ION L SOCI L IZ T ION

Most IN S officers and all officers wh o begin careers in

th e Border Patrol undergo rigorous training at t he federal

law enforcement training cam p in Glynco, Georgia. Th e

course, in addition to physical training, consists of rote

learn ing of Spanish and innu me rab le provisions of im -

migration and naturalization (citizenship) law.

Rote

memorization makes INS training ideal for inculcating

worldview messages. This training routine took shape

during a formative period in t he p olitical econom y of

the INS. In the late 1940s and early 1950s~major em-

ployers of undocumented Mexican immigrants inter-

vened in detail in INS operations and repeatedly at-

tacked the agency in Congress. The INS became

demoralized and was almost destroyed. In 1954 a new

director, G eneral Joseph Swing, forged a subtle political

compromise that eliminated direct intervention in the

INS by employ ers and rebuilt th e organization around a

dominant Border Patrol at the M exican boundary (C ala-

vita 1992). Border Patrol training and careers became

central to th e INS. The comprom ise forged by Swing dis-

appeared with th e end of th e bracero (c ontra ct labor)

program in 1965, when the recent period of Mexican-

IS . I t is worth emphasizing the relative infrequency of h um an

rights abuses by th e INS and framing th e issue in term s of abuse-

avoiding as well as abusive tendencies. The most comprehensive

report (American Friends Service Co mm itte e 1992:19) cites an an-

nual average of 425 abuses (thou gh othe rs may rema in unreported),

while the INS performs over million annual apprehensions and

roughly 400 million inspections, th e vast majority on th e Mexican

border.


9/28

268

CURRENT

ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36 Number 2 pril 1995

border undocumented entry took shape, but th e organi-

zatio nal pat ter ns of th e Swing era-the boundary focus,

the voluntary-departure complex, atte ntion to the w ork

behavior of Mexicans-serve th e INS in the current po-

litical climate. The messages in INS training thus do

not stand alone, a peculiar organizational tradition;

rather, they represent a vital link between the organiza-

tion as it unfolds and critical mom ents in th e political

economy.

INS training produces specialization in Spanish-

speaking immigrants. Neophyte Border Patrol officers

know th at failing Spanish will end thei r careers.16Three

editio ns of th e Spanish textb ook , spann ing 45 years (U.S.

INS 1943, 1972, 988), are impressiv ely similar in con-

tent; th e 1972 and 1988 editions are identical. Th e latest

edition, under wh ich m ost of th e officers I interviewed

were trained, refers to Mexicans or locations on the

Mexican border 53 times and to non-Mexicans 4 times.

(T he latter are tellingly referred to, in IN S jargon, as

OTMs, other-than-Me xicans.) Mexicans are under-

stood to be laborers; immigrants are mentioned in the

cont ext of l ow -wa ge jobs

5 5

times. An alternative read-

ing th at migh t emphas ize drugs, guns, knives, and crimi-

nal activities occurs less frequently, 18 times, mostly

in isolation rather tha n i n descriptions of actions by

Mexicans. The book does mention the crime of alien

smuggling 24 times, for obvious reasons. Thirty-four

sentences, including a series of major dialogues and

translation paragraphs at the end of t he text, express

disapproval for defiant behavior by immigrants ( Why

do you always lie ? [U.S. INS 1988:35]) or describe hu -

mility, remorse, and desire to seek entry throug h proper

channels. The Spanish textbook prepares the INS offi-

cers to think about a one-dimensional other: a Mexican,

in m ost cases seeking work, who in on e sense is engaged

in a covert activity, crossing the border, lying, possibly

being smuggled but in another sense can be persuaded

to be humble, truthful, and above all passive. I do not

argue tha t this is in fact th e only type of o ther embodied

in th e INS worldview; by delineating one type of proper

Mexican behavior, the Border Patrol's Spanish text

allows precisely for the creation, among INS workers

themselves, of a n inverted and negative image, an other

made of equal parts of defiance and nonhum ble wo rk

(e.g., drug sm uggling). If the former is expected, th e la t-

ter is to be censured, with important implications for

hum an rights in everyday INS work.

Th e other m ajor hurdle for prospective INS officers is

the m emorization of long charts detailing who is and

who is no t a U.S. citizen and other mi nutiae of immigra-

tion and naturalization law. Thi s knowledge is inter-

16

The key Spanish test in the probationary year after training

includes not only grammar and vocabulary but also a conversa-

tional component that serves as an attitude test, rewarding neo-

phyte officers for conforming to group norms of active rather th an

~a ss iv ework.

7

For this material

I

draw on an INS extension course with study

material and ex ams, includi ng a detailed outline of the Border Pa-

trol Academy syllabus [U.S. INS n.d.).

mitte ntly used by inspectors and may be draw n on occa-

sionally by Border Patrol officers. How ever, me morizing

it affects neo phyte INS officers long after they have for-

gotten, for example, the citizenship of persons born in

Puerto

Rico in 1890 or in Guam in 1890 to Spanish-

peninsular parents (U.S. INS n.d., lesson 2 3 : 7 The pan-

oply of ways of obta ining residen tial rights in th e Un ited

States reinforces an inc hoate se t of ideas in th e minds

of INS officers about th e U.S. polity of w hich th ey th em -

selves must be citizens. Modern citizenship delineates

a set of individuals, each in a person-to -state relation-

ship that conveys inalienable political, property, and

legal rights. Furthermore, citizenship has proven an im-

portant a rena of struggle with in capitalism, cou nterpos-

ing shared rights to resources redistributed by govern-

me nt and corporation to th e impersonality and inequity

of th e m arket (Barbalet 1988). Since INS officers are al-

ready rooted in social and cultural contex ts that assume

th e history of U.S. citizenship rights, cons titutio nal and

redistributive, they can see in t he elaborate opportuni-

ties to become a legal U.S. resident an d then a citizen a

way to reject, or set aside as others, persons wh o enter

the United States with no right to be part of the charmed

circle. An INS officer told me that the legalization of

formerly undocum ented U.S. residents mandated in t he

1986 Imm igration Reform an d Con trol Act offended hi m

because there are so ma ny ways to become a citizen.

INS trainees also mem orize lengthy lists of ex clusion

categories that moralize legal judgments (on e can be ex-

cluded for certain types of m oral turp itude w ith out be-

ing convict ed of a felony or even of a cri m e) . N S training

is usually th e employee's first and only encounter w ith

the sys tem atizat ion of capitalist and const itution al jus-

tice. It crystallizes mo re loosely formed understandin gs

about t he even-handed, written-rule-based, and citizen-

right-focused natur e of their job. Th is bot h se ts INS of-

ficers apart from the human complexities and needs of

the noncitizens with whom they deal and causes them

endless frustration and introspection as they contem-

plate th e fact tha t the U nited States, through its volun-

tary-departure complex, tolerates undocu mented work-

ers.

MANAGERS

District directors are powerful figures in the INS, pos-

sessed of considerable legal discre tion a nd i n charge of

all INS operations except th e Border Patrol for areas of-

ten encompassing several states. A director to whom

I spoke identified implicitly with the INS by reciting

career acco mp lishm ents and identified others in ways

that corresponded to the position's responsibilities.

Whereas specific persons were singled ou t in conn ection

wi th the netw orks of regional Am erican politics, aliens

appeared as an anonymous liquid flow that constantly

threatened to seep through holes in INS dikes and pour

into the interior of the United States:

I take im migrants b oth seriously and skeptically. I

am aware of some entrants wh o lie, who would do


10/28

H E Y M A N

Putting Power in th e nthropology o f Bureaucracy 269

mo st anythin g to get into th e U.S., but th e overall

big picture is th at t he U.S. is a count ry tha t a lot of

people in th e world wan t to be in. Th e global lines

of i t keep gett ing reinforced . I read newsp apers differ-

ently than mo st people-we all do, all of us in the

Service-if there's a flood or fam ine, a coup , i t af-

fects us, and m oving up the ladder it just gets more

SO.

This perspective has a function al basis in the realities

facing an INS executive. The INS risks being over-

whelm ed w ith persons-running ou t of dete ntio n space,

exceeding budgets. Therefore INS decision makers opt

to treat immigrants with potential r ights as logistical

problems, to be discouraged from legal options or

quickly returned.18 In an ironic inversion, undocu-

mented entrants w ho can be processed quickly become

a valuab le resource.

Th e Border Patrol operates separately within the INS;

the chief patrol agent is roughly equivalent to a district

director, while patro l ag ents in charge (PA ICs) of sta-

tions supervise daily operations. One PAIC frames self

and other in term s of the metap hor of war :

Military tactics says that you w ant t he high ground,

you wa nt to be able to observe, to work downhill-

truth fully it 's a military ty pe of s etting . We are be-

ing invaded, and the army that 's coming has thou -

sands of perso nnel. It's a nonv iolent invasion , and

the tactics to interdict i t have to be a nonviolent re-

sponse-it 's mu ch easier to shoot than to catch a

runner, arrest, and deliver him at the end .

Th e warfare or invasion me taph or was used deliber-

a te ly w i th m e a s i n t e r l o c ~ t o r ' ~o justify in the face of

subordinate and lateral criticism this PAIC's policy of

pressuring street-level officers to incre ase arrests in or-

der to generate increased funding. The PAIC intermit-

tently co ntemp lated th e futility of catching and releas-

ing hund reds of thou sand s of undo cum ented entr ants.

He mentioned alternative possibilit ies ( Nationally, I

have to rely on creating employm ent in a foreign co un-

try ) but retreated from such thoughts, using a spatial

metaphor to contain the m ( My world is very small-to

convince the chief patrol agent that I need resources

here-and I do th at w ith arrest statistic s ). Street-level

officers divide alien others into docile job seekers and

bad guysu-smugglers, guides, drivers, and others. Th is

PAIC promoted the arrest of simple entrants with out

inspection, whose processing takes minu tes; he explic-

itly places less emphasis on smuggling arrests. The bad

guys cost organizational time, up to three officer-hours

each for the preparation of crim inal charges. I shall argue

tha t th e tacit struggle of preferences ends in a compro -

18 Th is distri ct director had a policy of refusing to parole exclus ion

cases out of d etentio n and justified this precisely as a deterrent to

a feared greater flow.

19

ere

th e pronoun you initially drew me, the questioner, into

the conce rns of a Border Patrol manager while th e shift to the

rhetorically more powerful we heightened identification with

th e defense of th e U.S. citizen ry.

mise in w hich street-level officers furnish mass produc-

tion of qu iet arrests wh ile informally punishing p ersons

they perceive as bad guys or defiant arrestees.

The mil i ta ry-minded PAIC (wh o was himself not a

veteran) should no t be taken as representative. Ano ther

PAIC who operated under the same sector priorities

noted tha t und ocumented entrants moved and changed

tactics before the Border Patrol shifted agents to plug

flows. According to him, it was the imm igrants wh o

were proactive1'-governmental jargon used here w it h

great subtlety to express skepticism, since one is sup-

posed to be proactive, creative, decisive. His INS self

was passive while the other was active, the inverse of

th e U.S. worldview. H e described the task of his agen ts

as maintain ing a steady number of apprehensions with

the realistic assumption t hat i t would n ot always be pos-

sible to initiate or control the situation. Thus, he dis-

cussed th e managerial need to prevent or con tain embar-

rassing inciden ts of abuse, an issu e hardly raised by his

more aggressive counterpart. Yet this mo re relaxed atti -

tude was deeply painful for the PAIC himself. He ex-

pressed this by besieging his self ( The public perception

of the Border Patrol is that we are all bad: no o ne com -

ments on the compassionate acts ) and by distancing

the American public as an other through ideological

schemas of Mexican immigration ( The American pub-

lic is very gullible, uninformed, unconcerned; I would

like them to be concerned w ith th e high influx of il legal

immigrants ) .

Managers develop complex worldviews from their as-

cent through the ranks, their increasing command of

political m etaphors (undo cume nted aliens as invaders),

and their recognition of w ork situations th at present

specific pitfalls. They try to sell metaphors upward as

rationales for resource requests and downward as justi-

fications for orders, engaging both t he co mplex

U.S. pol-

ity and their ow n subordinates, who, working nightly on

highways or near the boundary fence, retain substantial

autonomy.

B O R D E R PATROL AGENTS

Aggression and reaction frame the impossible task of

Border Patrol agents. Here I examine two young men

thru st on to th e 20-mile boundary sou th of San Diego,

where nearly half of all imm igrat ion arrests are mad e

and where the potential for frustration and conflict is

g re ate st. R ick ~ i l l e r , ~ '9, is an Anglo American and

grew up in metropolitan Phoenix. He distances immi-

grants as others with impersonal terms, for example,

they. Wh en asked to free-associate on Mexico, he

replied, Tonks-that's ou r vers ion of a Me xican; it's a

derogatory word for an alien. Tonk in Border Patrol

slang derives from t he sou nd of a flashlight hit tin g a

person's head.

1 spite of his ability to belittle th e other, ~ i l l ~

20. This and all subs equen t names are pseudonyms. Som e personal

details have been altered to p revent identification.


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270 URRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36 Number 2 April

995

sense of ac com plish men t is severely wound ed by the

voluntary-departure complex. Asked to free-associate on

accomp lishments, he responds,

I

have hampered

smuggling in this area; I have not deterred the aliens

from crossing here. I have not deterred the smuggling,

just hamp ered it. 21 Asked about frustrations, h e says,

The feeling that our accomp lishments are so small tha t

it

is not effective. If t he service an d cou ntr y provided a

means to put an end to this I would feel more accom-

plishment in my job. Miller follows imm ediately wi th

a key Border Patrol concept, fun, th at compensates for

th e ~ a l ~ a b l eutility of the iob:

So wh at w e have t o go on is fun. I enjoy my job, I

have fun-since it is a gam e of tag and catch-I see

if I can ca tch mo re tha n anybody else, or how I

catch the m come up on a group on a trail, scare

them half to death, that's fun and satisfaction. Seiz-

ing a smuggler's car -$~ ,oo o, $2,000 car-and you

take it away from him . Different aspects of th e

job become a game to en tertain you w hile you per-

form the duty .

To Miller, undocumented aliens, rather than being fully

motivated hu m an beings, vary on one dim ension only:

they are either docile (runn ing is docile behavior) or de-

fiant. The assumption is that entrants understand that

the interaction between agent and alien is governed by

the voluntary-departure com plex (w hich is often true

but which does not allow for disorientation on the part

of aliens ). Mil ler calls th is the game :

If they run, they're illegal they know th e game,

they're docile if caught. They're delayed eight hours

and then they do

it

over again. Tha t's all we basi-

cally do, delay them . Aliens who aren't docile when

they'r e caught-well, I'm 6-4 and

25

pounds, I take

charge. My m ethods might be too harsh, but I use

th e force and m eans necessary to control people. If

we establish force firsthand, we're not going to have

problems. It's th e mor e docile agents who get as-

saulted. I do push people to th e ground, tackle them,

yell a t th em as I demand them to do what I want

them to do like sit down, put their hands on their

heads.

Seeking fun amidst frustrating work may, for some

individuals, provide t he pre mises for excessive force and

abusive language. The th ough t-wo rk involved in Border

Patrol line watch on th e international boundary is rela-

tively simp le (street, highway, or workplace questionin g

may invo lve greater complexities of citizenship and resi-

dential status) . People w ho ru n are very likely to be un-

documented; the more passive ones understand the

game. Tho se wh o physically resist, throw rocks, ru n

after being caught, etc., are treated not only as poten-

tially weapon-bearing threats-which, realistically, they

21. source of frustration here is not just voluntary departure but

also the INS officer's sense that U.S. attorneys rarely prosecute

small-scale alien smuggling and that sentences are short, some-

time s limited t o tim e already served (see Tone y 1977).

ma y be-but also as possible mem ber s of a very different

category of un doc um ent ed alien, variously called bad

boys, dirt-bags, scum-bags, etc . Border Patro l offi-

cers assume that they resist because they have some-

thing to hide; th ey ma y be previously deported felons or

face prosecution as smugglers or guides. Th is is selective

realism on the part of

INS

agents-the crim inal alien

deportation program has indeed created a new return

cycle from Mexico and Cen tral America-but overlooks

the fact that aliens may act from fear or confusion or

may be defending their ow n standards of justice and

worldviews of control over the border.22

Thrown rocks are one physically threatening act of

defiance that scares and angers Border Patrol agents. An-

drew Wells evidences the response often glossed in the

INS as comm on sense. Wells, wh o entered th e Border

Patrol in 1986, is an Anglo American from a sm all town

in southern New Mexico-an origin to which one might

impute potential anti-Mexican prejudice. Yet he mani-

fests empathy for the alien as hu ma n other: I hope they

don't go out on th e freeway; th at makes m e madder than

anything, especially if they hav e litt le children, because

wh at they are doing isn't wo rth risking their lives for.

He premises his brief sym pathy for undocum ented im -

migrants o n the futility of th e voluntary-departure com-

plex. Asked What is frustr ating? he answers,

First, it 's th e sam e ones over and over again; second,

you don 't get [i.e., you m iss] lots of people; an d you

try th e best you can, but it's n ot good enough really.

You reach a po int w here you say, 1'11 ca tch wh at I

can, and 1/11 et th e rest go by. You try to tell this

to th e new guys; at first they're fired up, they try to

get every alien in sig ht, and it's just no t possible to

do that.

Wells repeats the relaxation reminder even in connec-

tion with circumstances in which he was harmed by an

aggressive other : I've got a scar on the forehead from a

rock. It m akes m e pretty angry, especially w hen they're

throw n from the s out h side of t he fence, because there

is no t a thing you can do except get out of there. Wells's

i 'commonsensell stance is particularly important be-

cause he is a firearms instructor, which involves shoo t/

don't-shoot scenarios.

Relaxation, though ultimately a healthy response,

fundam entally discourages Wells, since t he passive self

is untenab le in t he U.S. worldview. He finds occasional

solace in acti vity in areas inside th e border fence where

immigrants stage before they run north, viewing this

limi nal terrain (Chavez 1992:46) as an open field for a

contest for spatial control: We push them back to the

fence because i t show s we still have control, plus i t gives

22. There is a glaring need for ethnography on M exican and C entral

American ideas of t he INS, in particular of just and unjust a ctions

by INS officers and of low-level or emoti onally m otivate d resis-

tance su ch as rock throw ing and insults (see Heym an 1991:18).

One crucial nexus at which this could be studied is the intersection

of individual migrant narratives with collective representations of

the anonymous

INS

in Mexican popular culture and folklore.


12/28

HEYMAN Putting Power in th e nthropology of Bureaucracy

271

us a little breather because we can retreat back north

and i t takes

a

little while for them to filter back

UD.

In the absence of real com mu nicatio n, attackin g space

normally accorded to immigrants also transmits INS

standards of behavior: Usually we get frustrated or we

get rocked somewhere so we decide to go in an d retake

their area. Yet, fundam entally, Wells alienates himself

spatially from U.S. society, speaking from down here

close to the struggle with the immigrants rather than

identifying th e self w ith t he bounded space of t he U.S.

state (a s in Kearney 1991): The INS is a paper tiger

which doesn't have public and congressional support;

from th e way I see it dow n here, no one cares.

Border Patrol worldviews are second-order rationaliza-

tions of dutie s wi thin th e voluntary-departure complex.

Rec ruits begin wi th t he civ ilian U.S. idea of policing,

reinforced by their detailed paper training in immigra-

tion an d natio nality law, as active arrest of all violators

of objective rules. They soon learn tha t undocum ented

entrants initiate the entry and determine the flow of

events and, furthermore, that management and polity

favor meaningless voluntary departure over punish-

ment. The rationalizations have three consequences.

First, they undergird both abusive and abuse-avoiding

behaviors. The critical acceptance of voluntary depar-

ture rationalizes relaxation i n th e face of alien defiance

of th e law. It is a mech anism for coping, inevitably in-

sufficiently ( in view of th e responses of a varie ty of i n-

dividual personalities), with what I surmise is severe

stress, a passive excitement i n which neither active ini-

tiation (fight)nor flight i s possible.23 How ever, t he B or-

der Patrol worldview also rationalizes informal pu nish-

me nt of defiant and morally reprehensible persons wh en

work routines do not permit time to process them for

formal legal charges. Secondly, an organization in w hich

many officers admirably adhere to abuse-avoiding rou-

tines tolerates abusive officers for lengthy periods of

time. Finally, Border Patrol officers rationalize work

mandates that favor easy arrest and rapid processing

by categorizing many Mexican others as docile work

or family seekers. Undocumented labor-force renewal

through cyclical migration is facilitated (tho ugh not de-

monstrably caused) by this choice and smuggling only

weakly impeded.

INSPECTORS

INS inspectors admit or deny admission to persons at

international p orts of entry su ch as the crossing points

23

Joey Corrales, a first-line supervisor working south of San

Diego, described passive stress: Yes,

I

have cautioned somebody.

You see an individual agent who is very emotional because of t he

position they are assigned, for example the [Tijuana River] levee

where you are in very close proximity to the aliens. When they

are not in control of t he levee, they feel very stressed, excited,

short-tempered. I talk to the agent at the scene, let the agent go

work somewhere else or leave the area, relax. It's stressful to catch

a lot of aliens, and even more to see a lot get away, so the first one

you catch, that one gets all your anxiety. Agent

X

is particularly

bothered by seeing aliens get away, so I don't assign him to those

positions.

linking U.S. and Mexican border cities. They m us t com-

mand

a

wide variety of legal and regulatory knowledge,

and they make fine judgments about the truthfulness

and applicability of verbal and do cum entary claims

made by persons seeking admission. Yet they make

these judgments under extreme time pressure and ap-

palling wo rk

condition^;^^

at on e major border port I ob-

served, inspectors work in billowing automobile ex-

haust four hour s per shift on the primary (front ) ine,

posing questions to irascible strangers wh ile under ma n-

agerial pressure to clear cars through a t an average rate

of 45 seconds per inspection. Inspections though t-wo rk

is thu s rich i n patterned expertise, routines, and rules of

thum b (see Gilboy 1991). These conditions give rise not

only to taxonomies at a lower level, however, but also

to overarching ideas about the inspecting self and the

inspected others.

The Inspections worldview adapts to th e spatial and

legal pecu liaritie s of port s of en try. First and foremo st,

INS inspectors at ports of entry represent the sover-

eignty of th e U.S. state; they hold significantly un-

checked rights to de tain, search, and interrogate all per-

sons, citizens or not, who must surrender themselves

for inspection before they acquire permission to enter

the country-and more complete rights there (Hu ll

1985 5 3-54). In primary inspection, the inspector in-

vades, with quick, probing looks and questions, the

space of pedestrians or m otorist s and quickly classifies

them by behavior and responses. Secondary inspection

requires interrogation, a carefully aggressive process of

mentally controlling the e ntrant, wh o is already under

physical control, in order to determine admissibility.

One might surmise tha t the power of inspectors is com-

pletely unchecked, but th is is not the case.

International ports of e ntr y are sensitive political en-

viron me nts. Th e cond uct of inspecti ons of Mexican citi-

zens and the flow of persons across the inte rnatio nal

boundary inevitably involve relations between the two

nation-states, represented by U.S. port directors and

Mexican consuls. Furthermore, U.S. local politics over

issues su ch as t he sp eed of traffic flow an d th e loss of

access to undocum ented domestics blunt th e

INS'S abil-

ity to tig hten en try control (Gilboy 1992:301-3). Gilboy

has demonstrated how subtle political considerations

penetrate IN S operations through th e thought-w ork in-

volved in learning to anticipate and avoid politically

sens itive denia ls of adm ission . Conversely , I observed

tha t port insp ectors are criticized for insufficient aggres-

sion if th ey ad mit a person w ho is later arrested by police

or other INS officers. This particularly worries INS offi-

cers on the Mexican border, where they double as anti-

narcotics customs inspectors.

T he contrad ictory realitie s of border ports of en try are

played out between INS managers and inspectors. Man-

agers (po rt directors and supervisory inspectors) demand

simultaneous aggression and political tact from front-

24

Work conditions are appalling through no faul t of t he INS man-

agers; they are a result of the enormous volume of pedestrian and

vehicular traffic at the Mexico-U.S. border.


13/28

7

CURRENT

ANTHRO POLOGY

Volume 36 Number

2

April

995

line employees through formulaic statements about

proper deportment; inspectors interpret this organiza-

tional doctrine within their own life experiences. In-

spections is one of t he tw o points of career entry in t he

INS, the other being the Border Patrol. In contrast t o th e

Border Patrol, Inspections recruits and assigns locally.

T he maj ority of officers are Latinos (of Mexica n an ces-

try) from border c ~ m m u n i t i e s . ~ ~hey inspect a popula-

tion that is largely of Mexican origin. They therefore

distinguish self from others w ithi n a c omplex sph ere of

loyalties, legal prerogatives, and the contradictory dia-

logues of pol itically sen sitive wor k.

Francisco Encinas, a supervisory inspector, grew up in

a cross-border family. He lived in Mexico but had U.S.

citizenship and attend ed school on t hat side. He phrases

his expe ctations of subordinates as follows:

A good inspector goes wi th t he flow of fraud and le-

gitimate cases. The problem inspector manifests au -

thority in a hard voice ( iAdbnde vas? Where are

you going?]) n th e tz [informal pronoun] form, gruff,

with no greeting. A good inspector is able to show

auth ority in relaxed, cool voice. In Latin culture, au-

thori ty is strongest if it is calm , cool, very courte-

ous, and formal.

Encinas represents the tension between aggression and

tact through a claim about generalized Latino culture.

He essentializes his own highly distinctive cross-border

experience in order to ma ndate a certain patte rn of be-

havior for the inspectors he supervises.

For all that Encinas partakes of border interchange,

characteristically for the INS h e remains capable of dis-

tancing himself from law-defying others. Using a Mexi-

can metaphor, he envisions himself saying to a docu-

mentary violator, This is the doorway to our house.

Would you let me in the doorway to your house when

vou catch m e in a lie? Furthermore, as he moves from

the local to the political economy, more fixed ideologi-

cal schemas emerge that force a contrast between ne-

glected law enforcer and too-liberal American im migra-

tion policy. Encinas com plains, as so ma ny INS officers

do, that th e 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act

legalized lawbreakers (persons in th e Un ited States

without legal status continuously since January I, 1982,

among others).

Maria Alicia Carbajal defines herself by pride in inter -

rogation. Carbajal was born i n th e United States and is

2 5 .

Of my interviewees, 8% started their INS careers in the Border

Patrol and 28% in inspections. Only 14 started in any other

branch. These two paths, then, likely strongly influence INS

worldviews as a whole. My interviewees as a whole were 32%

Latino; 3 6% of th e Border Patrol

officerslmanagers and 71% of

the inspectors/managers were Latino. The Border Patrol tends to

separate Mexican-border Latinos and Anglos from their local up-

bringing and instill a borderwide organizational culture; 56% of

Border Patrol officers grew up i n proximity to th e border, but only

8% were working near their original homes, and these had all

been reassigned from distant locations on the border. In contrast,

Inspections hiring is done by th e port of en try and thu s tends to

be local; 89% of inspecto rs were from the border zone, and

5 9 %

were working in their hom etowns.

thu s a U.S. citizen, but she grew up in T ijuana, Mexico,

returning t o th e United States at the age of IS . After z

years of college and I S years as a health care worker,

Carbajal went to work as an inspector in 1989. She de-

fines her self through her skill in breaking lies in sec-

ondary inspection: They call m e to break. I love

fraud. I really like m y job-the line gets tiring, and

th e fumes-but

I

love fraud. We have a sixth sense; you

can tell they're lying. I am in this position because

I speak perfect Spanish, so it's easy to tell they're lying;

inspectors with out Spanish miss things. Thi s defini-

tio n of self is premised on a redu ctive view of th e othe r

as fraud ( they are lying ). Yet Carbajal's responses

are no t entirely con sisten t: whe n asked to free-associate

about aliens she said smuggling (a n enforcem ent

re s~ on se l, et for Mexico she said resident aliens.

boider cibsiersll (tw o legal ways of en tering the u ni te d

States).

Carbajal vertically contained ( in Strauss's ter ms ) th e

complexity of her work experiences when asked about

her acco mp lishm ents: I am proud-too bad we can't

do more things about lane 2 5 [inspector slang for the

illegal entries visible to the sides of th e port]-but I am

proud of sto ppin g illegal aliens on my lane, of stop ping

smuggling drugs. I take care of m y country, do som e-

thing to help my country. Thi s is an extraordinary re-

sponse. Carbajal has lived the im mig rant experience; her

schema uses the struggle for state control over the bor-

der to grasp her U.S. self. In so doing, she su bordinates

the sch ema of uncontrolled un docum ented en try to pre-

vent it from frustrating her as it does so many other INS

agents.

Mary C arrasco has lived her w hole life in a U.S. border

city; her parents and, indeed, gran dparents were U.S. cit-

izens of M exic an ancest ry. She comp leted tw o years of

college and the n worked in various pink-collar jobs to

support her ch ildren before joining ins

Heyman. Anthropology of Bureaucracy

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