Immigration agents have a frontline view of the racial, economic, and legal inequalities that undocumented migration reflects鈥攁nd 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鈥擝order Patrol Agents and ICE Deportation Officers, most of whom are Mexican Americans from the region around the border鈥擵ega 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鈥� 鈥渕oral economy鈥濃�攖he configuration of norms, values, and sensibilities that undergirds how they perform their work. She also shows how the immigration system benefits from minoritized bureaucrats鈥� 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 associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
"Bordering on Indifference is a must-read."鈥擠aniel E. Mart铆nez, Social Forces
"Groundbreaking. . . . Bordering on Indifference illustrates the costs of empowering foot soldiers to manage a mostly non-threatening and compliant population of migrants with only a narrow skill set grounded in the use of force. . . . [and] sheds important light on the machinery of our immigration system."鈥擲tephen Lee, Columbia Law Review
"I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the inner workings of immigration bureaucracies and how institutional indifference and exclusion are produced at the everyday level."鈥擭icole Marie Ostrand, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"[Bordering on Indifference] does an excellent job in showing the reader how immigration agents, both Border Patrol agents and ICE officers, contend with the morality of their job using indifference. . . . I found the book eye-opening and informative in understanding how agents grapple with family separation and racial tensions."鈥�My Undocumented Life
"Vega has made an important contribution to the literature relating to control of the border. . . . Her interviews with agents, how they got where they are and how they feel about their work, opens up a generally ignored aspect of the story."鈥擟hristine Graf, Interlib
"Engaging, original, and well-documented."鈥�Choice
“An unprecedented study of the inner thoughts and actions of the people enforcing U.S. immigration law. Necessary and important.”—Asad L. Asad, author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life
“This is an important book that fills a gap in the literature of border controls and policing. It is accessible but theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written, and clearly structured.”—Ana Aliverti, University of Warwick
"Deftly and with care, Vega offers an unprecedented look into the work and lives of Latino/a immigration enforcement agents. Beautifully written, carefully conceptualized, and sharply analyzed, this pathbreaking ethnography offers exceptional insight into the creation of exclusion, institutional indifference, and the harm exacted through bureaucratic rules. A must-read."—Cecilia Menj铆var, University of California, Los Angeles
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