Moral dilemmas at the borders

In my research with immigration enforcement officers in the UK, they have shared the dilemmas that they face, particularly in relation to the detention of children and families but also in relation to the very nature of coercion in the context of migration. While coercion feels to them much easier to use in the context of a criminal, someone who causes harm – a murderer, a rapist – it is much more difficult for them to detain someone who is in the country for a better life, seeking better opportunities, and the only grounds for that detention being not having the right papers.

It is the site where more drownings, particularly, have been counted, and so Frontex increasingly has included in its mandate the function of saving lives at sea and that human rights aspect, which, in a way, links back to the politics of migration, because this is a very politically charged area of public policy.

There is a moral and ethical underpinning to these discourses. We are talking about people who are migrating from generally poor countries, from global south countries to the global north, and are being criminalized and treated as criminals – as illegal, for that matter. There is a range of ethical questions about the role of, for instance, the European Union and Europe, which have traditionally depicted themselves as the guardian of human rights, as this site of the birth of liberal democracies. We are increasingly seeing that discourses of control and punitiveness are intertwined with human rights and humanitarian discourses.

I will give you an example of someone who is a repeat offender, who is in and out of a police cell: suddenly immigration comes and realizes that that person has no papers, no leave to remain in the UK and could be removed from the UK instead of following the criminal process of prosecution, detention, imprisonment and repeating the same cycle. Many police officers appeal to immigration powers because of that level of effectiveness in dealing with problem people.

How the perspective of border workers enriches this idea of humanitarianism that has been criticized by border scholars is in appreciating how particular border policies, humanitarian policies, are enacted on the ground, and how that kind of ground level exercise creates tensions and contradictions between control and protection. It is also in how individual border workers deal with those contradictions. I think the idea of humanitarianism from below brings the moral reflection and moral agency of the people actually doing border work.

Many of the police officers we interviewed repeatedly suggested that tension made them reflect on their function. I think those reflections, although not well articulated in terms of policy change, are important as critiques from within, not just from the outside. I think both critiques are important, but what I have been looking at is that resistance to taking on a punitive and a controlling function to which the increased securitization of borders pushes these officers.

It is important to think about the moral dilemmas that officers face in their everyday work that question the politics from above, which legitimize and try to justify the function of borders and migration controls in terms of counterterrorism, security, etc., which are very distant from the ground-level work that these officers are doing.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025