Okay. So, uh, welcome, everybody, and thank you for coming to our I think it's the 14th annual Roger Cook lecture.
But as I was thinking this just before I came to in the last time that Roger corrected me kick and told me whatever number I said last year was wrong.
So it's possibly 15th annual lecture, but anyway, it's hard to notice them.
And, and today we're very pleased to have such a representative from from the University of Oslo.
I know Public Lecture Series was launched in 2006.
I'm now doubting all of my dates as to the story, to honour and celebrate the long and distinguished career of Professor Roger Hirst
and his particular contribution to criminology in Oxford and further afield.
Over the course of his career, Roger works on a number of different topics.
He's best known, however, for his work on capital punishment.
And while Cultures area especially is quite different, she shares with Roger a commitment to and engagement with global matters.
Russia's work, like cultures, is not only often based on research elsewhere, but reminds us that we live in a deeply interconnected world.
And this means that events and practices abroad affect us at home just as events and practices that we do at home affect countries elsewhere.
So as Cultural Explains Day in her presentation,
this kind of approach to criminology raises profound moral questions about the world we live in, our obligations to ourselves and others.
And perhaps if we can try and find a moment of positive thinking,
which is almost impossible these days, a way of thinking about how we might unite and work together.
So let me now introduce Curtis to you, and then I will hand over to her part.
Your friend CO is professor of criminology at the University of Oslo.
She's published widely on matters of migration, borders, security and surveillance of everyday life.
She's the author of numerous books and edited collections.
For instance, The Globalisation of Crime, which is entering its third edition and the Borders of punishment.
Culture, is a key figure in the field of border criminology,
having written many of the foundational texts that open such matters up to critical inquiry.
See. You can catch her to share with us some findings from her forthcoming book.
In her lecture, she will examine how the figure of the criminal and other has emerged not only as a central object of media and political discourse,
but also as a distinct penal subject connecting migration and the logic of insecurity.
So please join me in welcoming. Thank you very much.
Mary, can you hear me okay? Thank you very much for inviting me.
I'm really pleased,
really glad to be here and very glad particularly also to continue the connection between the University of Oslo and Oxford that Roger started.
Also with his work on death penalty and loss, not least with his friendship and cooperation with professionals,
Kristie, who was also my my Ph.D. supervisor.
So I'm really glad. I'm glad about that. Actually, there aren't many academic audiences that I would like to present my work to more than this one.
And also that I feel that I'm more scary than this one. So, um, but I think without further ado, I'll just sort of jump into this.
And I would like to start this with a story that I encountered.
The visit to a New York museum called Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Um, it is the museum tells a story of a building 97 Orchard Street and the migrant tenants that lived in the building over several decades.
And it's particularly the story of the building's families, Adolfo and Rosario, who, together with two year old Josephine and Baby Chong,
moved into 97 Orcutt Street in 1928, about five years after Adolfo, a stow away from Palermo, landed in New York.
Adolfo was a skilled cabinetmaker, having begun to learn his trade at the age of 14.
In 1935, one of the grimmest years of the Great Depression, he, like millions of others, was self employed.
Rosario, the youngest of the four children in a relatively well-off family, also from Palermo, married Adolfo when she was 16 and he was 26.
On what her daughter describes as doctored papers. Rosario also came to America illegally a year after her husband arrived.
Then to regularise their situation,
the two left for Canada and re-entered the United States legally in moving several times before getting to Orchid Street.
They behaved like many poor tenants during the Depression. Families forgot to pay September rent,
then moved into another building in October after having secured a month's rent concession from the new landlord.
Now the story is in many ways remarkable and shows the long, historic trajectories of irregular migration,
as well as the longevity of the intricate connections between migration and illegality.
The desire, Adolfo story is revealing of how migrants have throughout history employed
survivors strategies which make them vulnerable to the use of state penal power.
The realities of a migration of poor populations create an ever expendable
repertoire effects that this on the use of criminalisation and public condemnation.
Illegal state as a spoke of illegal entry as a stowaway, the use of force documents.
Illegal re-entry not paying rent and unemployment.
In contemporary Europe, such acts and also in America, of course,
such acts as these committed by race are and also both issues are increasingly met with
state measures and ultimately deportation and cancellation of their claims to membership.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, on the other hand, provides a different narrative.
It isn't acknowledgement of the irregular migration and the possible path to membership and as a legitimate part of national history.
And I think it's such a dynamic school upon some of the central insights about social processes surrounding criminalisation,
as those Christi, whom I mentioned before,
said provocative provocatively that crime does not exist on The Exorcist X often given different meanings within various social frameworks,
acts, and the meaning given them are our data.
Our challenge is to follow the destiny of acts through the universe of meanings,
particularly what are the social conditions that encourage or prevent giving the acts the meaning of being crime?
And I think this is quite a relevant point of inquiry that I would like to pursue in this talk,
because what I will do is sort of look at the developments through which contemporary societies,
particularly in Europe migrants, are increasingly my effects, like the ones bye bye, bye bye bye.
And all four of this area are increasingly seen in terms of crime, and they migrants or non-citizens are defined as penal subjects.
So what I would like to do is to sort of present or outline this condition of migrants or non-citizens as a distinct penal subject.
The great grandfather is a figure of the unwanted. This means that she or she is unwanted.
Not also when it comes to political discourse, but also for the liberal advocates of more humane border policies.
The figure of the other percent is a challenge because it paints the picture of migrants as some victims in need of help and deserving of hospitality.
So consequently, the notion of the criminal immigrant has been, to a large extent avoided also in academic discourse rather than addressed head on.
So in a sense, you could say that if migration is a sort of a tornado that's reshaping political landscapes in contemporary society,
this notion has been very much sort of thing still in the eye of the tornado.
And I think this is an omission that sort of needs to be corrected.
The great grandmother is by no means an attractive word. Even worse, it is, as I'm sure that Christine would have probably said a dangerous word.
It is a word which has the potential to preclude a deeper understanding and can prevent dialogue.
At the same time, this sort of thing is going to give us an understanding of some very central social dynamics that are taking place right now,
especially connecting the logic of insecurity surrounding migration and the use of, you know, and even military power.
So what I what I will do is sort of try to outline several several sort of defining features as I see them of the criminal and other.
Now, these features have been presented in the work of the work of others, many of whom are also present in this audience at the same time.
What I will do is to try to to draw on the findings of a research project that I conducted together with my colleague Kilimnik,
and his interviews with about 78 police officers conducting immigration control,
particularly those predominantly in Norway, but also in Frontex operations.
The interviews were conducted between 2012 and 2016.
Now, so the empirical foundations would be mostly drawn from a Norwegian reality.
But I'm hoping that to to to draw out of this some sort of more general insights.
One of the first and perhaps most obviously discussed features of the criminal career and other is of course,
the political and the media aspects of it. And these are the countries that I would use the least time on.
They have been described to me. Nicholas, the general has joined India and the work of war has described it as a spectacle.
The search of the images and the discourses are flooding information for trade migrants as a threat.
I think what is important here is that the spectacular is not only related to this sort of the threat aspects,
but also to the aspects of exclusion and the the stage aspects of security.
So that image on on the right hand on the top is actually a photograph taken at a
staged exercise in some sense by the Austrian police with the border regions of India,
where the migrants are actually the actors who are being hired to sort of showcase the the sovereign power
of the Austrian police and the ability of the Austrian state to sort of control control of its borders.
This spectacular is not only sort of confined to the sort of openly populist political climate,
uh, uh, in countries like Libya, such as Hungary and the United States, but also Norway.
Norway had this what has been described as its Arctic free snow.
I know that the quality is not very good. But in in the January 2016 or winter 2015,
about five in 5500 mostly Syrian refugees came to it for asylum seekers trying to cross Norway's Arctic border with Russia on bikes,
which sort of created a lot of the sort of political debates about it.
And for a period of time, Norwegian authorities started sending them back in through the -32 degrees, freezing on bikes back to Russia.
Now, this many people were sent that way. I think it was about 300 people, actually.
I mean, it's not.
Uh, nevertheless, but it was this sort of spectacular extent of, of social exclusion, which I think is quite unusual for a country like Norway.
But as I said, I was focussed. This won't be the main focus.
What I am interested in is very much the sort of the everyday bureaucratic practices of production,
of the careers of others, and following sharp assignments that focus encouragements to follow the body.
I think one of the defining features of the Kreeger and others is the relationship between migrants Bobby and the state.
One of the first things that happens when a migrant enters a European state is that his or her fingerprints are being taken.
This fingerprints and that are those tags into the system.
Your index system that allocates the responsibility for processing of asylum claims to different European, European countries.
Now, what is interesting to see here is this.
What European states are trying to do is sort of trying to create processes
connecting truth about migrants with their state defined systems of of knowledge.
This is not something which is news,
as James Scott had sort of a very eloquent convention about it is that the creation of magical people is one of the defining features of statecraft.
It is what is necessary for states to allocate rights, property rights and all kinds of welfare benefits,
good health benefits and so on to to their populations.
And it has been, as a scaffold, a talking point of this sort of identity.
The Tory logic is it also includes the need to identify and track those who have
wondered or travel beyond the circles in which they were personally known.
This is what biometrics does. It's not just biometrics.
What other aspects are using it?
For example, in Norway at least, it's quite common for those who are at this to use tests to test to to to a certain the age of an asylum seekers.
And the point here is that the thought is that these people come with are seen as not trustworthy.
What is seen as trustworthy is their bodies to become certain bearers of truth, very much technologically and scientifically minded, it gets true.
And what is also important here is this this establishment of truth often involves the use of force.
So EU Commission, for example, in May 2006 to establish if migrants do not cooperate,
Member States should make use of specific and limited use of detention and use use coercion as a
last resort in order to get the fingerprints and sort of to make this this databases operable.
And what is also, I think, important here, that it is,
even though this kind of logic sort of resembles very much what states have always been trying to do in terms of creating the actual people.
This attempt to create legibility today are global.
So the states are not only trying to identify their own populations,
but they are trying to identify populations of other states and trying to search on their identity.
So Norway or the UK, for example, are trying to find out who these people are, whether they come from Somalia or Afghanistan mainly.
Also, not only to be able to get the rights, but also to be able to deport them because identity but being identified as a
citizen of a different of another state is the cornerstone of the portability of.
And when it comes to bodies, of course, bodies are also bearers of threat.
And here's one police officer describing how, for example, they're doing deportation.
He says, we are not health personnel are in principle not supposed to get this type of information.
I'm not supposed to ask about it either, of course. But what is very interesting, though, is already contagious.
Is it natural to use a face mask? Do you have tuberculosis, HIV?
Preferably to trick everyone, just like in prisons. They have just same problem there for everyone as if they were contagious.
Use gloves. Do not let anyone cross directly at you. If someone is getting them out, use a face mask.
Always be careful about blood. So my point here is that the immigrant other very much has sort of bodily dimensions
that I think are important aspects of his or her relationship with the state.
Now, of course, one of the most vital, important aspects is the legal question or the question of inequality.
And as husband guilt sort of summarises, she says it was very similar to some illegal immigrants.
Is someone in respect of whose presence on the territory of the state, the state has passed the law making their existence a criminal offence.
It is puts it sort of quite bluntly, but I think it's quite,
quite an important point here that basically a section of the board also has said that the xolo,
the being born in the global south becomes a legal handicap, that this this this person's person sort of carries with them and sees him.
And you've done the going to say that this is quite different when it comes to sort of penalising these kinds of offences,
because when it comes to punishment in most modern legal systems, it is the conduct that counts.
Not legal status in immigration law. However, the relationship between legal conduct and status is inherently quite complicated.
Illegality is close to becoming like the custodial condition.
Now I'll show you some examples of how the officers that we talked to described describe this and then next.
So here here's one officer from Osler police describes describing a meeting with an Afghan citizen.
It was told that this he gave false personal information, I guess.
And yes, he does say this picture gives false information to the police.
You have committed a criminal offence. This is grounds for deportation.
The moment he gets a negative response on his asylum application, it means that he can be sent out with a ban on coming back again,
opposed to that of being sent forward and coming back the next day as a tourist.
This is something that we have sometimes kept in mind because it's happened before, in a manner of speaking.
One knows what's going on. That's you, my friend. Smells like trouble.
Now, who smells like trouble is very much defined by racial and gender aspects of their identity.
So it's not, you know, so it's not admissible if this was a question of a male Afghan citizens.
But it sort of confirms this sort of existential condition pertaining to illegality, which, for example, Erickson described is sort of in search of.
This is the kind of defining feature of some of these defining aspects of somebody's identity.
Here's another officer describing a different situation,
saying also from Buffalo Police District saying what they are looking for is, is this a person who does criminal activities?
And also, if we think this is behaving in a way which suggests that he's been crime.
Then we go in and do an immigration check to find out about his identity and background.
And then you can quickly see in his phone activity is like, do you got wides?
Do you got coat price?
I mean, that's kind of his within the piece doing shady business and then it is natural to do take a step towards the criminal law track.
What happens next is that we are discover he has the drugs on him.
If he doesn't, we can start asking questions about immigration law.
And then you can quickly see, for example, has he been in Norway long?
Is he hiding information about his means of sustenance in Norway and all that is relevant to immigration law?
And then we arrest him on immigration law, first and foremost, because we see that he's been crime,
but we cannot prove it in criminal law and sort of this interchangeability of immigration and criminal law that has been also described,
but to this point and other immigration law is very much a defining feature of this kind of condition, of your legality being a suspect.
Sure to be an existential condition.
And it is what what kind of has described as finding the person first and then finding an offence that you can pin on them.
Um, another feature of course is criminalisation for pertaining to sort of criminalisation of offences connected to,
to immigration law and a debate just anybody has written about the British reality
of this and pointed out that often these are the moments that are quite symbolic.
Now in Norway, the criminalisation has been particularly related to breaches of entry ban.
Authorities in 2013 increased the penalties from six months, maximum six months imprisonment to two years.
And I think what is interesting is that in the White Paper preceding the the increase in penalties,
they wrote the government wrote the proposition can in addition contribute to the reduction of other types
of criminality in Norway since a large proportion of those cross punished for breaches of the entry.
Them are also reported for a reported for for convicted of other types of crimes.
In addition, those who breached entry then went for a longer period than before not be able to commit new offences while they are in prison.
This effect is likely to be substantial. So we see that that's the measure is directed at the particular perceived group of class
of people who this work is believe are systematically associated with criminality.
And what we see is that that verges on the end for them have become a very sort of rather substantial sort of part of a of a prison psychosis,
a third of the total that are being given out in Norway.
Statistics Norway recently published the statistics saying that from less than 2000 prison days per year before 2009,
these kinds of offences consist now of over 74 prison days since 2016.
So we see that this is not just symbolic criminalisation, but it is actually quite real.
And about two thirds or 33% of the region prisoners are, um, uh, are foreign citizens.
Now. The final aspect of the film.
Thus, the subjectivity of the critic or other is the possibility that again has been, at least in the Norwegian context,
very much subjected to an increased, uh, use of state, uh, state courts and sanctions.
And here is another officer to explain how this transition from before to now has taken place.
He is working in the north and my right before it was more like this crisis came in and wants to
come to terms with came in and it was almost random how we discovered things the way we do it.
Now we have a scheme with what we call responsible investigator.
The risk that you are responsible, you have the responsibility to grow,
to go through all police registers, that is all databases into which police register information.
It was a different focus then. It was not something one focussed on.
It was like at the end of the year, yes, we have stolen so many expulsion cases now.
It is from the very beginning. That is from January. We go through what we have to produce, what is expected of each one of us.
And in our unit we have to produce 75 expulsion cases.
And this does not mean that we shall deport 75 persons, but we have to produce 75 expulsion cases that we instigate.
So it's like a non-citizen of a given state. The immigrant other is potentially deportable.
This means that he or she can not only be sanctioned by a community to various forms of social censure
punishment and exclusive to specially designated spaces such as prisons and correctional institution.
For his perceived brilliance, the immigrant others can see and often is sanctioned with a complete and permanent,
often permanent exclusion from the community. All of their community networks and social ties and put off by the punitive administrative sanctions.
Now, what I think this quote also shows that the portability is also a result of specific bureaucratic production,
that it depends on the state's willingness to produce this kind of results.
In Norwegian case, for example, officers who are systematically educated through seminars how to deport more people and the results are quite visible,
particularly between 2007 and 2006.
In 2006, it was it would be tough to hear the state sort of forcefully deported 8070 878 people, which is almost four times as many as in 2007.
Many of these expulsions pertain to the category of expulsion, rejection of people who have a criminal conviction.
Many of them are from Eastern Europe because as Eastern European citizens, they have in principle rights to staying away.
So in order to be deported, they have to be punished first.
And we discovered that often punishments are very minor and can sort of have to do only with fines.
Nevertheless, the deportation is the result of it.
So you can say that in a way no one has brought this. What my colleagues have described is a deportation machine.
And this is partly because rumour has it the term defined deportation as a performance targets for the police.
So the police districts are measured according to how many how many deportation cases they instigate, as we saw.
And this has been a very sort of effective, effective way of of increasing the numbers.
Now another feature, um, of the Crimea grandfather, which I will not use so much time on, is, of course, the power of knowledge, productive relations.
And again, I'm sorry about the quality of the images,
but what I would like to sort of point out is that as we saw that when it comes to the protection targets, that.
The other is very much subjective to the measurement to the production of knowledge.
So on the on, on your left hand side and from there you have a Frontex report statistic.
It's these top ten nationalities, cocktail nationalities, a sort of almost ocean road that's at least in Norway, but also in Frontex reports.
And so the police have four sort of creating scale sort of divisions of foreign nationals.
Then you have top notes, nationalities of illegal entry, top of nationalities of of use of force documents and so on.
The measurements also for case like on the right hand side to the to the sort of measuring the the
the criminal genic nature of of immigrant population and their differences with native population.
But I think is also important to the commitment, as I have written about elsewhere, is what is not being measured.
The aspects of migrants, victimisation of vulnerability, like, for example, the numbers of people dying at the border in the Mediterranean,
which is not a state responsibility and which is not no European state does systematically,
but is rather sort of uh, the basket has been taken over now by, by NGOs and non-governmental organisations.
So I think these are sort of the main aspects of what you could call the criminal and other that I think I could use one lecture on each one of them,
but it just I hopefully they give an overview. Now to summarise the criminal and other is subjective to distinct form of analysis,
analysis and a distinct team regime that to and to end because one that others have a have a have described in in much greater detail.
It is a penal regime that is mixing elements of immigration law and criminal law.
And it is sort of the use of penal power which produces alien, which it is not veto power, whose purpose is to sort of correct the morally reformed.
But it is its purpose is to banish and exclude.
So this this transformation has to describe the transformation from a narcissism to ban of the system.
And this year, because this has pointed out in the recent context,
this contrast is particularly striking because the the the inclusion even of
people who are committed of serious criminal offences has always been the norm,
the westward formality and so on. So I think Norway is a particularly good example of what Linda Bolton has described as hard on the outside self,
on the inside conception of citizenship, Norway's use of very sort of extensive use of the flotation devices application.
Well, so I think in the European context, that could be described as a sort of duplication among the duplication leaders is, uh, is remarkable.
Vanessa Barker has written about this similar dynamics when it comes to Sweden and the worry of the welfare state.
Now what can you do in the of the remaining this time is to sort of look at aspects of this other or you could say to work.
This particular subject does not in terms of sort of criminalisation, cities, recession and so on, but in terms of sort of the moral aspects.
Or you could say that this the migration of migrants today are not seen to securitise criminalise, but also I think more laws.
And I would start with a rather sort of long, uh, quote from a parliamentary inquiry that took place in Norway in February 2015,
following the protection of longstanding children with families and families,
um, where were deported were criticised for deporting this group where they should
that there was a political agreement that this group should not be deported.
Yes, there were almost sort of sort of there were part of this,
this push towards achieving deportation targets and the police sort of found themselves on the spot for that.
And the union representative of the police immigration unit said the following It is in the
employees interest to know whether what they are doing is morally and ethically completely right.
It is difficult for them to deport asylum seekers with a negative final decision if they are in doubt that this is the right thing to do.
This is why we need to know through political processes that this is an agreed policy.
We cannot do anything about this because the once we, the courts have a final decision.
So we're doing something that is legal, but the moral and ethical, this is important for people as well.
This is a very difficult job. It is a burden for the employees.
It is a burden to be for families with children. It can be a burden to the courts, single adults with children as well, without children as well.
A lot of our employees are concerned about doing the things that right so that they can go home and have a good conscience.
They have done a good job and not have a bad conscience, even though many of them probably have.
Now, I think that this this quote shows that the use of people power at the border is in many ways deeply problematic also for the people.
The people before you and can create this moral discomfort.
Now, it should also be pointed out that the controversy in this case was regarding the protection of children, which I think is also important.
And it is particularly in this context of this moral discomfort,
that the notion of a notion of the criminal and other performs the certain kind of work,
as Erikson has pointed out, is that forms of behaviour are a valuable resource in this society.
Or, as Tony Morrison recently, more recently said, that there are major benefits in creating and sustaining another.
And what I would like to discuss or consider this stuff is precisely what kind of benefits or the resources,
the sort of the idea of of criminal criminal migrants have for that poor performance of border work and more generally,
for the processes of social exclusion. Because what I would like to suggest is that this figure does it is pulling together
a regime of governments combining penal and military power on the one hand,
and actually humanitarian rationality on the other hand. And again, I would use another quote from this time from from uh.
From uh. Let me see from a newspaper report The Guardian reports on on the visit of the French president, Emmanuel Macron,
to colleagues who where she said where the report says that he also warned law enforcement officers their
behaviour must be exemplary and reminded them this Migrants were people who have travelled continents.
These men and women are human beings. It is a very tough mission and free.
You must be exemplary and excellent respect of professional ethics and excellent respect of the law.
This is not working waking people up in the middle of the night.
Most of you can see your guest during those times, he said. And it's such a behaviour he warned would be punished.
Now, I mean, obviously this is a deeply paradoxical statement,
but at the same time as even though, uh, uh, this, you say that this sort of the particular,
that this sort of use of tear gas during his time or the practice also of whipping up
families in the middle of the night is also was sort of we find similar kinds of concerns,
uh, in our, in our interviews. So here's one of his first, um, from before this immigration mutiny saying the same.
I think the dynamic is about position perspective against the criminal.
So this. So these students and what somehow does not manage to see both.
You wish to be efficient and not come in vain. So coming up at 4:00 in the morning is perhaps efficient because you know, this people will be there.
But this is it is tough for those who are exposed to this is when it is reported in the media, then you have that aspect as well.
Is it necessary, unnecessary use of power and unnecessary use of force and such?
So the case is this. I think that these things are a bit difficult.
And even though we feel perhaps that there is no substance, it is in criticism that we are following the rules,
what we are look forward for that we are doing things properly.
I think that at least we know that there is also that aspect because because quite often the focus is the opposite.
You get a very negative focus on for four nursing asylum seekers so suspicious.
So I think this statement is revealing that the communities of border control are sort of happening in a deeply problematic,
contentious field and under intense media scrutiny so that you have this sort of the the figures
of both the question are the victims or the offenders and how to behave humanely in deeply,
deeply inhumane situations. And. There has been work by, among others, Mary Bosworth and others,
pointing out that the officers performing these kinds of or also detentions test and so of performing these kinds
of tasks using various materialisation techniques and denials to be able to cope with these kinds of tasks.
And that often sort of what one tries to prioritise deportation of criminal offenders rather than deportation of children, for example.
And to understand this, I've sort of been examining the work that has been done on the concept of moral economy,
the concept which is sort of popular popularised by by E.P. Thompson in his 1971 seminal essay.
It was a firm analysis of food choices in the 18th century and sort of looking at delegitimization of royalty in the eyes of the participants.
And the concept of moral economy has been in recent decades through decades,
sort of resurrected for the particular divided by the Jefferson and his co-workers in the sort of developing style of moral anthropology,
also by Philip Bourgeois, looking at the two practices of families and so on.
And the concept has been through this sort of transdisciplinary migration freedom class conversation.
And Thompson was already in 1991, was quite critical of this use of the concepts of the class, class conversation.
Um, also, society acknowledges that, that,
that the concept runs the danger of sort of being meaningless or banal at the same time as it has been useful doing or understanding the particular
deconstruction of patristic meanings which are given to certain acts which might otherwise be constructed according to other imperatives,
such as, for example, waking children at families in the middle of the night and so on.
And I think it is it can be useful for understanding the paradoxical nature of the exercise of power in humanitarian fallen.
Now, if we are to bring it also closer to Thompson's words and the meaning that he gave Keith.
I think also there is another aspect that at least in our material, that we find very interesting parallels.
Because he's situated in the changing nature of work and production and the impact
of mass market switching and most mass production at home from craftsmanship,
craftsmanship, or the transformation from craftsmanship to two mass mass production.
And if these kinds of transformations can create intense morals and moral engagement,
I think, oh, Carol, we actually found out that officers were engaged.
They were opposed. They were criticising these kinds of practices, often not through direct,
sort of directly expressed sympathies with migrants, but with the feelings that that their work,
particularly through the corrosive impact of, uh, of new public management, were sort of reduced in terms of professionalism.
And this kind of critique was actually quite also higher up in the system, not just that's not just on the ground level.
So are a statement. It was an official statement given by a great leader of the Police Leaders Union in 2007.
Since the first frequent controls of individuals can be experienced as experienced as a burden with more resources
for detection and the protection follows extra pressure on police districts to deliver on the performance targets.
Those who are to be deported do not have to wait in asylum centres.
They have to be found. In some cases. The focus has been on the residents.
Just increase the numbers focuses on performance,
but focusing on performance targets can be it to reduce stress in the police amongst people who feel they have been unfairly treated.
It can be directly destructive for the reputation of the police.
Now similar sentiments also sort of framing the idea in terms of the critique in terms of of morality
was also were also expressed in the following interview with the Women's Experience Officer.
You can also see.
Well, it can be said that internally within police, within the police, there are different understandings of how to apply immigration law.
It is just as well. If this came out, some look at this form, this from an ethical perspective.
That is us. While others are much more concerned with performance targets and such and the ethical side saying the
performance targets are wrong way of doing the work and admits that this is a sensitive field to work in.
Well, it seems to me that the others, the other side have not reflected on this well enough.
I know that within the police immigration news, there are disagreements as well.
So we can see that there is actually definitely there was a fair amount of debate within the police itself,
whether the this sort of transformation towards a focus on the immigration law in that location was, was the right way to go.
Uh, and the officers felt that they were being under pressure.
And in this kind of context, as I suggested,
is that the notion of the community and to serve the kind of work and it was summarised by guys like this are shown during this parliamentary debate.
So I could say that the police wish to do a good and professional job and work
strongly against criminals or those who have become criminals with a final decision.
So the final decision pertains to the legality of, of, of the importation decisions,
whereas the connection between professional trials and criminal criminals is actually
quite an important aspect because they wish to define their work as a way of sort of,
uh, sort of excluded criminal, criminal offenders.
So the notion of the criminal court other than the work is key.
It's mostly because it's this power. It has he has the power to make difficult decisions and to constitute moral boundaries.
This is why boundaries are sort of being constituted on several levels of the nation and through deportation practices,
Anderson points out, states nation states are not just sort of arbitrary collections of individuals.
They are communities of values. But these distinctions are also happening within the level of what might be described as humanitarian consciousness.
We're talking Costello has described this distinction between refugees and other migrants.
Where did the notion that the category of refugees is sort of carved out, out of the category of either migrants,
where most of the efforts, humanitarian efforts are focussed on them, where a while the others sort of become become obscures.
Mary Box was hosting her work describes how, for example, foreign men are racialized and gender talk are defined as racial and gender brothers.
So these ideas about migrants, of course, the grandfathers sort of creates hierarchies and distinctions between migrants,
between good and bad victims and defenders members and non-members.
And deserving and not deserving.
And it is precisely because these lines of distinction are framed in a language where language of goodness and empathy,
as the Sun also has pointed out, it has difficulties actually in articulating a discourse of rights, justice and inclusion for the idea of migrants.
And I think this book becomes particularly noticeable when it comes to the discussions about smuggling,
which are particularly shaping the dynamics of the external borders of the U.S.,
where the notion of of of the use of the illegal smuggler has sort of become a kind of suitable enemy,
where the responsibility is particularly for the most tragic aspects of border control, such as migrant mortality.
The Mediterranean is very much squarely placed on, on this sort of evil and very organised criminal organisation organisations.
So Frontex, for example, in their reports they write that the rising death toll may be results from criminal activities aimed at making
profits through the provision of smuggling services at any cost and in the work discipline and ideas on Frontex,
for example, they describe sort of a much more graphically in one of their reports.
Uh, there's an officer describing the incident or where, where he, because I was on a mission last week.
This is from a Frontex report. It was force aides to force nine thunderstorms with hail.
We got a call that there was a search and rescue case.
We started looking just as a scene where they got very bad and destructive boats were reported missing.
Eight of them had been washed out onto the shore. Among these, there were the seven year old girl.
This girl had been promised private in the European Union, but she had been cheated of her life.
She paid to be dead in a of tasers. The people traffickers left her to die.
It is very painful, very distressing. So we have very much this innocent victim of the innocent of these girls.
And as the figure of the of the illegal traffickers. Julian Brashear, Houston.
Recent research on trafficking networks in North Africa points out that migrant
deaths are not interpreted as in the fortunate product of border control.
But this is compelling proof of the need to keep fighting the infamous smuggling networks that they can have an advantage of the misery of others.
So this notion of the evil networks becomes a justification for stricter border control,
even though Rockefeller Sanchez has pointed out the reliance on smuggling and not just from the lack of accessible vehicle and safe
mechanisms for mobility and the sort of the organised crime nature of these networks is very much disputed in empirical scholarship.
So to sort of uh, approach conclusion, uh, I would like to say that in a sense the, the, the, the,
the idea of the immigrant father has important aspects in terms of sort of creating and justifying the strict control measures.
Now when it starts to sort of become problematic is when we have categories like when it comes to, for example, children mentioned before.
For us here we have one officer describing the following.
A policeman has never read about a war that is not good fight because Norwegian police made serious mistakes during the war years.
It is a shameful side of our region police history. It's not it should not happen.
The police, in a way, start hunting down groups and minorities which are keeping away from crime just because they are from one group of people.
Well, this is wrong. It's not like it's not for which you have said is your greatest for Pakistan, for this person.
So it's right. What's the point for you? Well, I think what is interesting about this statement is two things.
In this case, it is not the fault of the innocent child, but it is equally innocent.
Seven year old grace from Pakistan. This doesn't feel right.
It is the sort of the criminal the criminal criminal aspects of their identity.
But it doesn't it just feels wrong.
But what is interesting also is the reference to history and to the Second World War.
And that was actually something that's cropped up in several of the interviews.
And tape is a bit of a surprise, but in a sense, the objections to the practices were partly sort of framed, as I said before,
in terms of the critique of new public management, of performance targets of this,
the decline in professionalism or the sort of the references to to the Second World War.
I think in a way you could say the ultimate moral failure.
Um, and the, the critique was most interestingly formed in the language of human rights.
Human rights were not in the sort of dictating to the police officers.
Perhaps it has something to do with Norwegian police officers, which is their self-identity.
It feels a bit like the mass sort of human rights aspect. Um, that this is something that Eastern European officers needs to learn.
But the history aspect was, it was, was something that was sort of a heavy burden.
And here's another another officer. This is a quote from an article that fit in.
And I wrote some years ago ago about Frontex, who was sort of comparing this to this,
the sort of the the discomfort and framing and within the view of history.
He says the most challenging part for me was, as I talked about earlier, well,
it was so bad that my thoughts went to the dark side of European history.
I began to reflect over these.
These are very personal thoughts, but I thought about those who are participating and they're not citizens who are involved.
What are you thinking? The same as I am. They did try to find a way to justify it.
Did they understand that what they were doing was wrong? Is it wrong?
Should they be involved in this? Should we not be involved?
I had a very amount of practice guarding my back, which is which in a way supports me that this is group.
But then you see, at least I see if nothing happens, what's the point?
Many such things. This part has been a challenge and we've talked a fair amount about it down there.
Not exactly with the same perspective as with about whether it was right for us to be involved.
Are we contributing to something good or are we just helping Greece to do something wrong?
I hope that my children and grandchildren can look back on what their father and grandfather did,
something that was right, that he did something good, that this will not be a shadow of European history.
The sides have contributed too. I really hope so.
So this sort of focus on history and the disaster in the image of the Holocaust, I think is a it's a very interesting.
And at the same time, the essence of the discourse, the critical impact of human rights is this is, I think, a very interesting aspect of it.
It is also true to conclude, I think if we look at sort of how how the severe systems of social control have been understood previously,
it had been very common to to use them. So to see them sort of the infliction of pain in terms of families,
famous analysis of social production, of moral indifference such as this, in a way,
astute moral judgements now from all materials emerges the slightly different
pictures where this is very much alive with all kinds of moral judgements.
Both talked about morality, but also judgements, moral judgements of migrants of people perceived differently than themselves,
but also about migrants, this sort of more sin, unworthy, innocence and guilty.
And I think this aspect of morality is something also that I would be also very happy to discuss with you.
Um, in the broader discussion, I think I am sick of negative stuff here and I don't.