bordering on indifference: race and morality in immigration enforcement

How a largely Latino/a workforce of immigration agents reconciles the moral ambiguities of its work

Immigration agents have a frontline view of the racial, economic, and legal inequalities that undocumented migration reflects--and yet most agents do not think of the role their jobs play in those inequalities. Instead, they consider themselves law enforcers, trained to confine their work strictly to crime control and security. In Bordering on Indifference, Irene Vega offers an original, detailed analysis of the rationales that shape how U.S. immigration agents understand and carry out their professional responsibilities. Drawing on interviews with ninety immigration agents--Border Patrol Agents and ICE Deportation Officers, most of whom are Mexican Americans from the region around the border--Vega examines why they took the job and how their training and socialization shape the ways that they grapple with the racial and moral issues raised by their work.

Vega shows that indifference is the bureaucratic resource that allows agents to look away from the most morally ambiguous aspects of their work and helps them cultivate legitimacy for their employer. She traces the development of the agents’ ＂moral economy＂--the configuration of norms, values, and sensibilities that undergirds how they perform their work. She also shows how the immigration system benefits from minoritized bureaucrats’ labor. With Bordering on Indifference, Vega opens the closed doors of nondescript government buildings and goes into remote areas of the Southwestern borderlands to uncover the hidden normative world that immigration enforcement agents inhabit.

Irene I. Vega is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.