Analysing how immigration control is actually implemented is a difficult task because state agents refuse to be observed by an outsider when at work. Whereas it is always possible to study the immigration policy with a method based on interviews, such an approach would be limited to the officials’ speeches that teach more about how they view their jobs rather than about what they actually do.³

In order to be able to confront state agents with their job practices, I chose to use a "participant observation" method, which means immersing oneself in an alien social reality in order to observe social phenomena while at the same time participating in it (Bourdieu 2003). That is why I volunteered to become a "temporary clerk" at a desk in charge of receiving asylum seekers and deciding whether they have the right to stay in France. Every year, prefectures in the biggest cities look for temporary workers to respond to the influx of asylum seekers at certain times of the year, especially during the summer when the prefectures are understaffed due to vacations.

The acquaintances that I had made while doing my PhD helped me to apply for one of those "summer jobs" usually reserved for the agents' children. To solve the "unending dialectics between the role of member (participant) and stranger (observer and reporter)" highlighted by Hughes (1984: 503), I opted for the status of being "publicly a participant and secretly a reporter".

Thanks to my PHD student status on immigration policies, I was able to maintain a certain ambiguity about the reasons I wanted to obtain this job, in order to be able to conduct a "covert ethnography" (Calvey 2008). For the people I worked with, it was clear that my application for a summer job as a clerk was a way to look at the behaviours of migrants. However, it was inconceivable for them that I might be there to observe my colleagues. I  played on this ambiguity by focusing on the fact that my foreign language skills could be helpful for a task that consists of receiving migrants. I never openly explained my intention to investigate the front-line workers’ job practices. Thus, for a full month, I worked in a prefecture service in charge of granting and renewing residence permits to asylum seekers.

As a recently recruited front-line agent, I was at first unsettled by a type of job I did not know at all and by a form of pressure that I had not experienced before. Receiving foreigners does not entail any physical exertion because clerks remain seated for most of their working day. However, I felt a mental weariness related to the never-ending flow of people who hardly speak any French and for whom complex procedures and unfamiliar situations must be explained. Front-line agents must also translate the documents drafted in bureaucratic lingo for an audience that can speak minimal French.

These daily situations are what agents usually call "front-line pressure". This term refers to the high number of foreigners waiting in line (as soon as the prefecture opens in the morning, the maximum number of people that can be treated in a day is generally already reached) and to the maximum number of files that can be processed in one day. Each clerk was required to process 27 files daily, but this number could be adjusted according to the complexity of the dossiers.

These statistical constraints are normal in immigration control services but they are more constraining at an asylum reception desk, due to the language barrier. My English and German skills were of no use when I needed to explain to the migrants how to fill in their forms because they spoke languages I do not command. At any rate, my colleagues were across the board eager to remind me that I was supposed to speak only in French, as a local representative of the French administration. The front-line pressure was also intensified by the constant scrutiny of the managers, embodied by the head of staff who stayed behind the front line so that they could monitor the performance of the clerks and the quality of their work. This supervisory practice can be compared to the Panopticon described in Foucault's writings (Foucault 1977): the head of staff can watch every employee at work but the employees do not know if they are being monitored. Despite all the difficulties and effort integral to the clerk position, I also realized the advantages it offered in comparison to other services in charge of welcoming the public: since asylum seekers are not treated as national citizens, the clerks interacting with them enjoy a high degree of autonomy in their daily tasks.

This participant observation also gave me access to the daily sociability of street-level bureaucrats: discussion topics during the breaks, jokes, comments on the behaviours of migrants. This informal dimension of their work is generally absent from the literature since scholars focus on the professional experiences of clerks. However, stories and jokes shared by front-line agents are insightful. When the working day was over, some of my colleagues used to mimic the Romanians who had burst in tears to make fun of them. It was also a way to assert the clerks were not fooled. These private jokes tell more about how the agents perceive the asylum seekers than some long and endless abstract discourses on the different treatments reserved for asylum seekers according to their nationalities. As in many other work situations, the use of humour helps to reinforce the cohesion of the group of colleagues: through different sorts of jokes, they want to show their unwillingness to feel sorry for asylum seekers, whom they constantly suspect of faking unwellness in order to get more than they are entitled to.

A couple of years later, I led an ethnographic study in the visa service at the French consulate in Tunis. This experience helped me to add nuance to my ideas about discretionary power. Like their counterparts in the prefectures, agents in visa sections of the Consulate have to make a significant number of decisions that are crucial for the foreigners who apply for a residence permit. But in their daily work, they are confronted with double binds.

On the one hand, they have to assess each claim, the "migratory risk" that the visa seeker represents, taking into account such criteria as their family situation, social status, education, and income. On the other hand, the head of the service is supposed to maintain good relationships with the Tunisian authorities, which implies giving full and sympathetic consideration to visa applications from persons close to the regime. Pointing out the possible contradiction between these two goals helps in understanding what is at stake in the daily attributions of privilege. In the city of Tunis, exemption files for issuing visas are treated in a separate office and can number 20,000 out of a total of 80,000 visas annually. This high number of waivers goes well beyond classifying these actions as "corruption": circumventing the law in exchange for compensation is not the exception but is clearly part of an institutional system of exemptions.

At the very top, the consul in person has to comply with demands emanating from local authorities every time diplomatic issues are at stake. Some special claims are directly managed by the ambassador who, after assessing the influence of the claimant, can decide to grant an exemption such as a visa free of charge. The office manager also has to deal with exemption claims submitted by various ministries or lawmakers. These requests for exemptions can either be for professional reasons, such as an artist or a businessman invited by the authorities, or for personal reasons: for instance, the housemaid’s cousin or the au-pair’s husband when he or she is recommended by an authority. The decision-makers are also likely to grant claims for their own close relatives or for staff who work in their office. Hence, privileges are not granted on an exceptional basis in these cases, and they play a key role in two ways. On the political level, exemptions enable the French government to maintain good relations with the local authorities. At the social level, these privileges standardise the practices of the French state with those performed by the local authorities. Studying daily life in a Consulate sheds light on the use of a hybrid culture, composed of arrangements between state central institutions and some local power practices.

A sociological analysis of discretionary power does not limit itself to highlighting the discrepancy between the law and its implementation. At stake are all the social, economic and institutional determinants that influence the daily implementation of the law and which warrant analysing.

Rejecting legal formalism, Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that the regulatory measures of the law are reinterpreted and redefined by the agents responsible for implementing them. According to the agents’ dispositions and interests, they can use their scope for manoeuvre differently, ranging from strictly implementing to exempting or even transgressing the law (Bourdieu 1990). Following the same logic of inquiry, one needs to study the background, career and social trajectory of the front-line agents who are in charge of implementing discretionary power, taking into account their present and potential situation in the structure of distribution of power (inside the bureaucratic field) as well as on their professional practices.

However, taking into account front-line agents' social background is not enough to explain all the forms assumed by discretionary power. It is possible to study discretionary power within a bureaucratic field, by placing immigration policy, its institutions and agents in the broader context of “the extension of bureaucracy and the strengthening of movements for political rights” (Bourdieu 1987). The implementation of the law always produces power struggles that involve different players and institutions. Furthermore, the room for manoeuvre given to state agents does not reduce itself to the clear-cut alternative between permission and prohibition on the one hand, and between the strict implementation of and exemption from the law on the other. When it comes to immigration policies, a large part of the differential management of illegalisms depends on the time-related aspect of the law. Bureaucratic practices obviously depend on legal disposition and administrative rules, but they cannot be understood outside of the time span in which they are implemented (Moore 1963; Bergman 1992). First of all, the strategic use of time implies for state agents the ability to keep one type of foreigner waiting while a swift decision will be made for another type of asylum seeker. With this in mind, time is the most conspicuous manifestation of bureaucratic domination in an administrative office.

Time is also used as a key variable in the pace of decision-making when granting a residence permit or enforcing sanction. Delaying one’s decision is more or less a mundane means to keep a user in legal uncertainty to test their determination. Combining ethnographic inquiry with studies on archived files can be helpful in showing the importance of time in implementing immigration policy: the strategic use of time manifests itself, conspicuously, when observing the waiting lines at the counter and, retrospectively, when delving in archived individual files which show the succession of residence permits issued (Spire 2008).

In other state offices that deal with all types of users (not only foreigners), discretionary power takes on a slightly different meaning. It does not limit itself to the unilateral power of a state agent but rather leaves room for users to negotiate. Decisions and sanctions taken by front-line agents also depend on the tools they have at their disposal and the collective norms that are accepted in each office (Calavita 1992).

One can then extract a two-tier variable system in the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats. First, within the same administration, the implementation of the law can have a different effect according to the social background of its front-line agents and to their role in the work organisation. Secondly, the everyday interpretation of the law can also change from one administration office to another, according to the type of users they welcome. Discretionary power has to be analysed in the frame of interactions between the civil servants who implement the law and the users subject to administration controls, taking into account the possible presence of actors (non-governmental organizations, social workers or lawyers) who are likely to step in. This dynamic of interactions enables state agents to constantly redefine the line between what is legal and what is not, or between what is acceptable or not.

The Front Line for Foreigners
The importance given to immigration in public debate clearly contrasts with the relegation imposed onto the institutions in charge of dealing with foreigners. It is uncommon to meet workers who deliberately apply for front-line desk jobs at prefectures or in other places dedicated to grant visas. The discredit given to this kind of job is an old story indeed. In the bureaucratic sphere, the value given to a desk is related to the type of people who use it; front-line immigration workers are belittled because of the depreciated status of foreigners coming to the prefecture gates. This sort of relegation is not only symbolic; it is also visible in the working conditions that are less advantageous than in any other service. In fact, services in charge of immigration must deal with a tremendous number of files and a lack of working tools and staff. A parallel (or more precisely a homology) may well be drawn between the social position of civil servants in charge of dealing with foreigners and the social status of their claimants.

Beyond this relegation visible from one department to another, one can nevertheless notice substantial variations according to the workstation and the task assigned to each agent. Working at a front-line desk implies interacting face-to-face with migrants, whereas working in the back office requires the ability to make decisions after reading a file. Managing a service in charge of immigration implies being able to establish norms based on juridical text, in order to adapt the practices to every case. Civil servants who manage services dealing with foreigners are in a lower position compared to their colleagues with similar responsibilities in other departments. However, their managers allow them to implement their discretionary power. This combination of relegation and autonomy is one of the characteristics specific to the task of the agents in charge of immigration.

The deterioration of the prefecture buildings and the tools at the staff's disposal confirm the street-level bureaucrats’ feeling of being abandoned; some will even confess to feeling sacrificed by their managers. Offices are very often too cramped to receive such a large number of people, the working tools are faulty and the classic cliché of files spilling out of cabinets and drawers can be seen in every office. Yet the stigma attached to immigration services is not only visible in external signs. As with any other French bureaucratic civil service, women form the majority of the staff throughout the ranks. The denigration attached to the task of receiving foreigners enables women to become office managers more readily than in other office jobs.⁴ Generally, the agents who work in such services are more likely born abroad, naturalized or from the French Antilles than agents in other more prestigious services. This over representation is partly related to their position of inferiority in the French bureaucracy. As in the manufacturing industry, dirty work is given to the most stigmatized people in the informal relation network (Hughes 1952; Pedace 2006). The excessive numbers of bureaucrats who are people of colour is not only a sign of their stigmatisation; they also reveal the will of their managers to use them as a shield against being accused of unfair treatment, discrimination, or racism.

Front-line agents can add remarks in the margins of the claim form, but the final decision passes on to another agent in the back office who will not necessarily take them into account. Here is an example I witnessed at the front-line desk of a prefecture: it was the case of a Lebanese priest who applied for a one-year residence permit. Once the interaction was over, the lady at the front desk wrote "likeable" in the margin of the form. However, the decision remained uncertain for the state official who had to deal with this file:

When we have to make a decision like this or when it is about regularisation for family reasons, we need to think thoroughly before reaching the decision, because if we grant the authorisation once, we will have to renew it again and again... The problem is that we are a bit lost in our job, we have all the necessary texts but they rarely match the cases we face (Interview with a prefecture officer).

The loophole in the law increases the discretionary power of the state officials. Since the priest did not provide any documents to prove his source of income, he was granted a short three-month permit, so that he had time to gather the additional documents and that other administrative branches were consulted about this case. This way of keeping claimants on temporary resident status, full of uncertainty for them, has become a rule for the services in charge of immigration. The choice to extend temporary status and postpone approval of a permanent residence permit is a way to test the migrant’s resolve since it would be illegal to plainly dismiss their request. Besides, such a bureaucratic use of time is a limit imposed on the claimants in their rights to challenge a decision, and it maintains the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats for a future decision. As migratory flows are increasingly controlled, the risk of granting a permit to a foreigner for the wrong reason is considered greater than refusing it for unlawful reasons. In one case, the agent risks being gainsaid by their managers for not being severe enough, whereas in the other case agents have little chance to be blamed for being too "strict", unless the case is brought to court, which is not an issue for services in charge of immigration.

The discretionary power of front-line agents in the immigration services is not limited to their ability to implement the circulars. What could be understood as an interpretation of the text could be indeed a plain violation of the law. In some prefectures, front-line agents regularly ask asylum seekers to show documents that will prove their identity, even if the Geneva Convention exempts them from doing so. Some migrants are not aware of this text, but even if they do know the rule, they do not regard it as an imperious command but as a constraint that could harm the efficiency of their service. In such a case, the law plays a secondary role, sometimes even a subsidiary role.

Fuelling Juridical Insecurity
Whereas the dematerialization of forms is praised as a way to rationalise and simplify procedures, it entails more difficulties for foreigners. The requirement to apply online poses an obstacle for foreigners and often hinders their access to prefecture front-line desks.

Foreigners who have just arrived in France are kept in juridical insecurity, that is to say they have no idea about how the law will be applied to their case. When migrants succeed in reaching a front-line desk to request or renew a residence permit, they have no means of knowing if they will leave the room with a renewed residence permit, a notification, or an order to leave the country. Migrants feel lost among a series of processes and rules; they do not understand the logic and language of bureaucracy. When they challenge a decision, they are usually reminded that they are not French citizens. They face powerful street-level bureaucrats who do not always know the law but who are entitled to impose their own interpretation of the circulars. Most of the time, the office managers instruct them in how to read the circulars, which implies huge variations from one district to another. The implementation of the law depends on a set of local characteristics that are indeed at the heart of the legal decision process. The discrepancy between instructions as written in circulars and the way they are applied on the field has always been significant in French immigration policy, but nowadays it appears to have widened. During the thirty-year post-war boom, immigration was not seen as a political issue and the vast majority of the circulars remained inside the bureaucratic sphere, out of range of public opinion. The aim of those circulars was essentially to standardise civil servants' practices across the territory. But since the beginning of the 1980s, immigration has become a political issue and is more and more present in the public debate (Laurens 2009). Most of the circulars are now released and accessible to the public; some of them are appealed in court and can fuel the political debate about immigration. The high-ranking civil servants who write those circulars are thus obliged to use euphemisms, allowing street-level bureaucrats to interpret them and to apply what they could not explicitly express.

Of course, every personal story is unique and each case reveals its own particular situation. But by connecting stories with the political context, the systematic suspicion raised by the government services on foreigners becomes clearly visible. The legal decision-makers are so focused on tackling "fraud" that they constantly revive the image of migrants as a threat to national law and order and the integrity of the state. This fight has also become an obsession for street-level bureaucrats (Alpes and Spire 2014) each time they have to deal with the rights of foreigners, even those who have connections with French nationals. The suspicion quickly turns into an accusation, through expressions like "marriage of convenience" for spouses of French nationals, "paternity of convenience" for French children's fathers who apply for French citizenship. The connection between the fight against illegal immigration and protection of the state carries new meaning via an extensive vision of French sovereignty. In this representation of the world, families are seen as a legitimate institution that should be protected against any attempt to add foreign entities without the state’s approval.

This argument regarding fraud is at the heart of a culture of suspicion that changes the meaning of every social and matrimonial migrant practice. Until the beginning of the 1990s, foreigners who applied for citizenship for their children were viewed as wanting to integrate into French society. Nowadays the same claim is understood, in the eyes of high-ranking civil servants, as an attempt to break the law. Likewise, the increasing number of marriages between French nationals and foreigners used to be considered an "indicator of integration" but today, it is perceived as the revival of "marriages of convenience". This rhetoric of suspicion put in place by politicians and widely broadcast in the media has found multiple responses in immigration control services.

While for many claimants the ten-year-long resident permit, created in 1984, represented the first step on the path to integration in France, it has now become the ultimate reward in a hurdle race. In fact, among the foreigners entitled to live in France in 1994, more than 40% were granted a ten-year-long permit, but since 2013, the rate has fallen to less than 10% (Math and Spire 2014).

This decrease in the number of long-term residence permits is the result of both increasingly restrictive legislation and a culture of suspicion that consists in reinterpreting any migrants' behaviour as possible fraud. Little by little, this culture of suspicion permeates other state agents involved in the same campaign against illegal immigration, even if they are not officially in charge of controlling immigration. For instance, the physicians who work for the Ministry of Health France are coming under tighter and tighter government surveillance when they must provide medical expertise on the health of migrants who are at risk of deportation. Labour inspectors are also increasingly recruited by the authorities to track down undocumented foreigners, even if those workers are proportionately seldom involved in breaking labour laws.

The public agencies engaged in tackling unemployment are also participating more and more in this spiral of repression. This recruiting of state agents against illegal immigration is not necessarily based on official government orders; it seeps insidiously into professionals’ and street-level bureaucrats’ behaviours, who had previously not been involved in migratory flow control. Increasingly, people who work with foreigners endorse this culture of suspicion by showing their willingness to crack down on fraud. This growing action against foreigners produces individual resistance and collective protests among some immigration agents, but it can prove effective among isolated agents who are less protected by their status or who are convinced by the aim of tackling illegal immigration.

This front-line policy has the effect of keeping foreigners in an insecure and vulnerable position, which increases the rate of foreigners who do not demand their rights (Waris 2012). First, foreigners belong to the weakest and most precarious fringe of the workforce; they are less capable of dealing with legal complexities and French bureaucracy. Poor housing conditions, lack of education and disorientation are among many social factors that keep foreigners from enjoying their due rights, especially when they are faced with complex files and forms to fill in. The second series of reasons is found in their status "alien": they must comply with a set of rules, like submitting requests for asylum, work permits, state medical aid or citizenship application. In all immigration control services, the discretionary power given to the street-level bureaucrats weakens the migrants' demand for their rights.

This front-line policy also accentuates discrepancies that are clearly noticeable from one desk to another, such as refusing to register a file, postponing a decision or compelling a claimant to register under a specific status. The implementation of a law or a circular depends essentially on how office managers explain the content of the text to their subordinate staff. Furthermore, inside the same department, the street-level bureaucrats do not necessarily apply the same meaning to management’s instructions. The agent who examines a case refers to legal criteria, but the decision also depends on their background, that is to say on their professional status, seniority in the job and career. Differences between one service and another are heightened by the discretionary power given to street-level bureaucrats. Uncertainty and arbitrariness have thus become central elements in the relationship between migrants and the French state.

Agents in charge of controlling migrants are not the only ones to focus their tasks on illegal immigration crackdown. Other civil servants are often summoned to assist them. For example, doctors in charge of delivering certificates on the health of undocumented migrants expecting medical treatment are being ever more closely monitored. Historically, the role played by doctors who work for the administration has always been for the benefit of public health, not to decide on individual cases. However, over the last few years, doctors have more frequently been asked to tackle illegal immigration.

The enlistment of civil servants does not necessarily depend on official instructions or directives but emerges thanks to encounters with prefecture agents who openly speak out about immigration. Through informal discussions, public health agents adapt their medical mission to a role of immigration control. Other civil servants whose jobs, in principle, have nothing to do with immigration policies are also progressively enlisted to support the crackdown on undocumented migrants. Health and safety inspectors are for instance often recruited because they are the only state agents allowed to enter businesses without holding a legal search warrant. Civil servants in charge of unemployment are also involved: they systematically have to provide prefectures with a copy of the residence permit of any foreigner looking for a job.

The control of illegal immigration has tightened in all countries across the European Union over the last three decades; in France, this trend has resulted in an unprecedented number of deportations and a full restructuring of state immigration offices. Such a policy is based on a new institution network that aims to enlist more civil servants in the surveillance of illegal immigration. This immigration policy based on quantified objectives has also brought about a steep increase of appeal cases in court. To deal with the increase in deportations, associations and groups who help undocumented migrants focus their tasks on the legal follow-up of each claimant.

1 I use the phrase "selective closing of border" because some foreigners continue to be entitled to enter the territory if they are considered useful for the French economy or if they have been recognized as refugees.

2 In the French hierarchy of the sources of law, the circular is at the very bottom of the scale of legal texts. It is below the decree, which is below the law, which itself has a lower value than international texts. A circular has the same value as a memorandum and can always be challenged in administrative court.

3 On the gap between speeches and practices in case of racism, see Deutscher (1973).

4 On this topic and more specifically on the history of immigration control in France, see Spire (2005).

5 Hughes (1956).

6 That’s the same case at the Mexico-United State Border where "the principal thought work mechanism is the division of immigrants into illegal but honest workers and immoral drug and alien smugglers" (Mc. Heyman 1995:379).