This chapter analyzes the role of U.S. immigration enforcement agencies in constructing negative images of unauthorized immigrants, such as the image of illegality, and especially concerning migrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. We take as our premise that U.S. enforcement agencies do not operate as objective, regulatory bodies, but as social actors that can, and do, promote negative perceptions of target populations for public consumption (see Chavez, Chapter 4; Nicholls, Chapter 10). As such, we view these practices of social construction as the production of ideology to advance organizational goals. We hold that these constructions and use of ideology are highlighted in bureaucratic functions where organizational personnel are involved in coercive or potentially coercive enforcement (including the possible use of lethal force) affecting large numbers of people. This is the nature of U.S. government bureaucracies involved in immigration enforcement, for example, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The construction of images of migrant illegality has been a permanent ideological feature of U.S. border-control bureaucracies since the founding of the Border Patrol in 1924. In a manner that was not done at the U.S.-Canada border, the U.S.-Mexico borderline became a bureaucratic marker of illegality directed at Mexican migrants who entered the United States without visas. In the 1920s, this likely served more than a function for border control, because regions of the Southwest were still contested by Mexican American groups that made claims to territories taken over by Anglos after the end of the U.S-Mexican war in 1848. For example, less than a decade before the founding of the Border Patrol in 1924, Mexican Americans in the south Texas border region undertook an armed uprising against Anglos (Acuña Reference Acuña1981). From this historical perspective, the early social construction of illegality of the Mexican migrant served to de-Mexicanize the Southwest and to make Mexicans “illegal aliens” in a previous Mexican homeland. It was the beginning of a delegitimization of Mexicans that by the late twentieth century would impact even other Latina and Latino migrants in U.S. interior regions far from the border.

We take as a basic definition of ideology for our discussion the construction of a set of ideas by social actors to explain and promote a course of social action. Moreover, we identify the drive for the construction of ideology as emanating from the human property of reflectivity (Mead 1974) – that is, that humans are thinking beings whose cognitive and behavioral dispositions can be, and are, affected by the propagation of ideas in their social environments. We view bureaucracies as major purveyors of ideology in social environments (see Sjoberg and Vaughan Reference Sjoberg, Vaughan, Vaughan, Sjoberg and Reynolds1993).

Moreover, we see as the hegemonic ideology the constellation of dominant ideologies across institutional spheres (e.g., policy and economic) that serve the interests of elites and helps preserve the established social order. While ideology has been emphasized by some (Gramsci Reference Gramsci1971; Lukács 1971; Marx 1967) as an element of class domination in a capitalist society, we believe that it also has currency in other social arenas where ideas can affect courses of collective action.

In particular, we see our analysis as following points raised by Foucault (Reference Foucault and Elders1974: 171) that a critical task for understanding our society is to unmask the operations of institutions that appear to be nonpolitical in order to expose the functions of “political violence” they carry out. Furthermore, we believe the study of enforcement bureaucracies advances the understanding of Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” as it concerns “apparatuses of security” that are “essential technical means” in organizing governmental power (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991: 102–3).

We divide this chapter into three parts. The first part lays out a conceptual description of the bureaucratic production of ideology to support coercive work. We argue that all bureaucracies produce ideology in some measure, but that it becomes particularly important for bureaucracies involved in coercive enforcement, such as in immigration enforcement. The second part of the chapter illustrates ways through which U.S. bureaucracies involved in immigration enforcement use ideological materials to support their programs of coercive enforcement. The third part of the chapter discusses the impact of ideology produced by immigration enforcement bureaucracies for the larger society.

The Coercive Bureaucracy and Its Production of Ideology

We start our discussion with some general observations about ideology and conflict in the social order. We distinguish two broad dimensions of the social order of a society: a material dimension and an ideological dimension. The former dimension is composed of the goods, assets, and resources unequally owned by the citizens; the latter is composed of sets of ideas, rules, and beliefs that validate the legitimacy of the order and serve as frameworks for an efficient management of the society. We define an ideology as hegemonic when it encompasses the ideologies that favor the prevalent social order in spite of how unfair or reliable its beliefs might be (see Eagleton Reference Eagleton1991: 29–30). Hegemonic ideology is spread at different levels (e.g., tastes, values, education, and politics) by the audiences (individuals and institutions) that identify themselves with these views. This dissemination is orchestrated (although not totally controlled) by those who have power to dominate the society, and by those who benefit from the social order.

Using Giddens’s (Reference Giddens1984) theory of structuration, we assert that the rules (the ideological dimension) and the resources (the material dimension) are recursively organized, making the structure of society dual, as the medium and outcome of the practices this structure organizes. This recursiveness also points at the inheritance of remaining traditional beliefs that conform to prevailing ideologies. Not only do several core ideologies evolve in the present, but they are also reinforced by unresolved past beliefs. Racial/ethnic ideologies belong to this group of core ideologies. They justify picturing Latinos as a threat or as inferior (see Chavez Reference Chavez2008; Santa Ana Reference Santa Ana2002; Chavez, Chapter 4). Although these ideologies are not examined here in detail, it is useful to link them with the construction of illegality to characterize undocumented Latino migrants because the illegal label strengthens old stereotypes against the Latino population, which keeps tarnishing the reputation and image of the Latino in the United States. From this perspective, the illegality of the Latino migrant conforms to the mainstream negative depiction of the Latino in news outlets and public debates (see Chavez, Chapter 4). As De Genova explains (Chapter 2), immigration laws have also played a key role in the construction of Latino immigrant illegality.

From this perspective, we view ideology produced by U.S. enforcement agencies as having an integral role in the social construction of the borderline between the United States and Mexico that sets Mexicans apart as “others” (Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez and Perea1997). The impact of this ideology is such that in everyday life the U.S.-Mexico divide appears more as a U.S. border than a Mexican one, as the Mexican concern for maintaining the border pales in comparison with U.S. enforcement concerns.

In consonance with hegemonic ideology, state-produced ideology deals with structural inequity not only by establishing laws and by targeting poverty as a problem, but also by promoting partially fictive inclusive discourses that intend to ameliorate potentially conflictive scenarios. Instead of separating the state-directed ideological beliefs as operating in relatively independent power networks that interact with tangible powers, such as economic, military, or political (see, e.g., Mann Reference Mann2005), we emphasize the interaction and overlapping of these beliefs (also including prevalent core ideologies that transcend the political realm) as a state-produced ideology that conforms to the hegemonic ideology with the purpose of efficiently managing the society. While the reification of ideologies carries the risk of misrepresenting reality by not identifying more specific causes, the lack of a better understanding of the importance of ideologies might lead to underestimating the effects that collective beliefs have on realities. Not only do ideological misrepresentations of reality become normal, but they also buttress claims that are perceived as legitimate. In this sense, it is useful to remember that state-produced ideologies also can serve as cultural capital, and that cultural capital is convertible into other forms of capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Biggart2002) that empower individuals and institutions.

A coercive ideology is a state-produced ideology composed of beliefs that justify the official coercive force exercised by the state agents, including violence, to preserve the hegemonic social order. The prevalence of coercive ideologies depends on the degrees of violence in conflict areas: the greater the violence generated by the conflict, the greater the need of more justifications, which recursively strengthen the coercive ideologies. We can better identify the importance of coercive ideologies in conflict arenas where social actors are attempting to alter the social order. The most extreme conflictive realm is the one in which crimes against humanity are systematically perpetrated. Here the hierarchy of “abusers over victims” echoes in a radical fashion the material structural contradictions.

In the case of crimes against humanity, the state attempts to control the conflict by exterminating the opponents and those who are close to them. Moving from the realm of crimes against humanity to the realm of immigration enforcement programs in the United States, the exercised coercive force is justified by understanding the undocumented person as a threat without considering her or his human condition using more complex views. This ideological objectification also justifies the nature of the violence: it is necessary to deal with the threat at any cost. Not only does the coercive ideology recursively construct the image of the migrant as inferior, but it also distorts the understanding of the culture of the migrant, creating a distorted understanding which is accepted by many U.S. citizens and other legal residents.

In the arena of U.S. immigration, Mexican immigration has long been considered a threat to the very established U.S. social order. In 1978, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency director described Mexican immigration as a national security threat even greater than the Soviet Union (Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez and Perea1997). This was a monumental claim given that the source was the chief U.S. intelligence officer at the time, and that the Soviet Union presented a Cold War threat that included a large arsenal of nuclear weapons. The claim was another example of what Leo Chavez (Chapter 4) calls the Latino Threat Narrative, in which some mainstream social actors view Mexican Americans as harboring the intention to take over the Southwest of the country. Even in the twenty-first century, leading social analysts continued to characterize Mexican immigration as a threat to U.S. society, as exemplified by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington’s writing on the dangers that Mexican immigration held for U.S. culture (Huntington Reference Huntington2004). While such alarming voices do not carry the day in all immigration debates and legislation, they do reinforce the ideology that migrants, especially Latina and Latino migrants, are a threat to the U.S. social order, as explained by Chavez.

The social context of contradictions, where groups face each other in contention over material or ideological claims, makes necessary bureaucratic ideological work to help legitimize the force and extensiveness of state enforcement. Bureaucratic ideological work transcends laws and rules; it is a tactical representation of what is considered illegal, with negative associations often portrayed as well founded and real (see Foucault 1995). This is especially true in societies with a democratic political system in which state bureaucracies are subject to regular parliamentary review and oversight. At a minimum, bureaucratic ideological work is intended to promote the view that the large-scale process of coercive enforcement is valid and necessary, and, at a maximum, that it is essential for survival.

Ideological work includes negative labeling of the target population (such as, “leftist subversives” and “illegal aliens”). The intended audiences of the ideological constructions are internal and external. Internally, bureaucratic agents have to be socialized into the cognitive set (values and behavioral predispositions) of the bureaucracy. While some new agents arrive already assimilated into the bureaucratic perspectives, other new agents have to be prepared for the daily handling of targeted persons in a manner that does not diminish the agents’ sense of their own humanity. In this way, agents can time and again process thousands and thousands of individuals (men, women, children, young and old) for removal from their families and communities. Procedural manuals, graphic mission designs, intraagency schedules, timetables, and so forth all also help to promote the enforcement activity into a dehumanizing process or one conceptualized as a corporate remedy to a social problem.

The display of corporate culture and efficiency overlays an organizational veneer on the management by force of human beings, producing a working atmosphere in which the highest priorities concern the operation of the agency and not the humane treatment of the persons under its control. By law, usually as a result of litigant pressure, enforcement agencies have to maintain minimal standards in the care of the persons in their custody, but the biggest concern of the agencies is for carrying out their coercive mission. The veneer of corporate culture manifests a business image furthering a sense of officialdom for agents.

Usually absent in the corporate business approach of enforcement bureaucracies are serious concerns about the humanity of the persons under their control, that is, how the bureaucratic processing affects the welfare of the persons being processed, especially beyond their physical health, such as their emotional status, self-esteem, and the anguish felt from being removed from one’s family. Concerns for the humane treatment of the targeted group are irrelevant for agencies intending to eliminate persons under their control, but some agencies involved in coercive enforcement maintain at least an image of concern, if only for public consumption. It is mainly an attitudinal image, however, rather than a behavioral one in which the agencies would undertake unsolicited action to improve the welfare of persons under their control.

Organizational rationality and business approaches promote bureaucratic ideological work in coercive enforcement agencies because they evoke sensate qualities among agents that have a confirming effect of the validity and value of the coercive mission. That is to say, within the context of a democratic society, something as rationally organized and primed as the officially designated agency can only be thought of as producing positive effects for the greater good.

The challenges of bureaucratic ideological work in coercive enforcement for external environments are several. Bureaucracies do not operate in social vacuums; they function in political environments, and this requires the social construction of reality to frame debates; promote agendas and funding priorities; and lessen or deflect opposition and criticism. In the U.S. political arena, this means that there are congressional funding and oversight committees to assure; constituencies to maintain; other public groups to win over or at least pacify; and opponents and critics to counter. In the bureaucratic context of democratic governments with periodical transitions of elected policy makers and appointed top administrative officials, second-tier and lower organizational managers of coercive bureaucracies have the constant task of ideological reproduction. Moreover, constant ideological work is necessary because bureaucracies never solve internal or external challenges in a “once and for all” manner.

In the case of immigration policy, U.S. enforcement bureaucracies face a host of opponents and critics outside the governmental sphere. These actors include religious and human rights organizations (e.g., the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee), and a long list of advocates in the immigrant rights movement, which stretches across the whole country (see Friedmann Marquardt, Snyder, and Vásquez, Chapter 12). Moreover, ongoing research on immigration continually supplies the public sector, particularly the media, with information that raises questions about the impacts of immigration enforcement activities. An example of this was the flurry of media attention on the deaths of migrants in border areas after sociological research brought this topic to public attention (see Verhovek Reference Verhovek1997). All of these reviewers and critics keep the immigration enforcement bureaucracies ideologically predisposed to defend their activities.

Ideological Themes of Immigration Enforcement

In this section we address and elaborate on three ideological themes used by immigration enforcement agencies of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Two ideological themes concern the nature of the enforcement agencies as a high order of moral authority and as guardians of the nation. A third theme concerns the degradation of the target population it seeks to control.

Bureaucratic Ideology in the Larger Society

Ideological constructions of immigration enforcement bureaucracies reach the larger society through various means. The means vary from community forums and exchanges with local news media to regional announcements of new enforcement measures, and to national policy declarations by the high offices of the bureaucracies. Information released by the bureaucracies varies by specific theme, but the announcements are usually framed with statements regarding the high duty of the bureaucracies and the growing menace of unauthorized migration, which according to the bureaucracies must be confronted for the good of the society.

This ideological framing has been purveyed in roundups and repatriations of immigrants, of which there have been three highly publicized cases since at least the late 1910s. “Palmer Raids” conducted against foreign-born radicals during the Red Scare deported more than five hundred immigrants to Europe from November 1919 to January 1920 (Kanstroom Reference Kanstroom2007; Murray Reference Murray1955). U.S. deportation campaigns removed four hundred thousand Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children to Mexico during the Great Depression (Hoffman Reference Hoffman1974), and returned more than a million unauthorized Mexican migrants to Mexico during the late 1940s and early 1950s, culminating in the so-called Operation Wetback of 1954 (Hernández Reference Hernández2010). Finally, the U.S. government has deported some 3.8 million migrants from 1997 to 2011 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2012, Table 39), that is, since the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, which greatly enhanced the deportation process (Rodriguez and Hagan Reference Rodriguez and Hagan2004).

The massive level of deportations – primary of Mexican migrants – since the passage of IIRIRA has become a growing feature in the daily life of migrant populations in small and large communities, affecting a host of community institutions, for example, workplaces, schools, places of worship, and retail centers (Hagan, Rodriguez, and Castro Reference Hagan, Rodriguez and Castro2011). Moreover, the involvement of local police departments in immigration enforcement, which is promoted by IIRIRA and the new federal program Secure Communities, makes these local agencies additional sources of coercive enforcement of migrant populations. These developments require greater bureaucratic ideological work to keep pace with the growing enforcement in order to rationalize its extension.

One means through which this ideological rationalization (see Thompson Reference Thompson1990) is provided is through television programs of Border Patrol operations on the Southwest border. The television programs highlight the different ways through which migrants and their smugglers attempt to cross the border clandestinely, portraying the migrants as illegal actors (“illegals”) and the Border Patrol as an institution of national defense. This technique defines the moral quality of the migrant by the single act of an unauthorized crossing, which is usually considered a misdemeanor. What is not shown is the migrants’ side of the story, that is, their social backgrounds of struggles for survival and the conditions of poverty that drive them to the border region in the first place. Herbert Marcuse (Reference Marcuse1964: 8) comments on the ideological impact of media as follows: “Can one really distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents of manipulation and indoctrination?”

There is another impact of the ideology of immigration enforcement bureaucracies that plays out on the larger societal plane. The impact is the enhancement of hegemonic ideology in which core institutions provide social constructions of reality that diminish the reflective powers of individuals as they take on a greater identity with their society. As Marcuse explains in One-Dimensional Man (1964), the outcome of ideological change in advanced industrial society is not the end of ideology, but its penetration across mass production and mass distribution and consumption diminishes individual reflectivity and resistance. While Marcuse (1964) is concerned with the ideological power of industrial culture, one can propose that state institutions also contribute to the hegemonic ideology that combines economic, political, and societal concerns (see Thompson Reference Thompson1990), such as concerns of unauthorized immigration.

Finally, it is likely that bureaucratic constructions cause some Latinos to identify closely with the mainstream, including with its dominant white racial stock, and thus for reasons of racial identity differentiate themselves from Latino migrants who come to the United States to escape poverty. It is also possible that some Latinos, including some mixed-race Latinos, identify strongly with their white Latino heritage (in both phenotype and culture), becoming “honorary whites” (see Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2006) and seeing themselves as racially different from the populations of Latino migrants.

Bureaucratic Ideological Prospects

Immigration enforcement bureaucracies will continue to produce ideology in their work as long as international migration continues to be a source for the reproduction of social relations in the advanced capitalist economy. As Saskia Sassen-Koob (Reference Sassen-Koob and Smith1984) has described, the economic restructuring that has promoted the growth of a highly skilled and professional labor force in the U.S. advanced industrial economy from the 1960s to the 1980s also has created a new labor demand for low-wage jobs in sweatshops, industrial homework, and other industries that attract immigrant concentrations. Even as aggressive immigration enforcement removes hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants annually from the country, many other unauthorized migrants continue to supply the labor power for this new labor demand that supports the workforces of core institutional sectors of society. In the absence of a new measure to incorporate unauthorized migrant labor into the formal sector, ideology will continue to be a means for coercive immigration enforcement.

Future Research

In this chapter we have outlined several aspects of coercive bureaucracies and used U.S. immigration enforcement bureaucracies for illustration. Yet, our discussion remained mainly at a conceptual level of analysis. Empirical research is needed to investigate how changes in the larger society may be affecting the coercive predispositions of enforcement agencies. We view three developments to investigate that may affect these predispositions. One development concerns the racial and ethnic makeup of Border Patrol and ICE agents. The research question from this perspective concerns whether the growing number of Latino agents since the 1990s, including the number of women officers, affects the treatment of Latino migrants, that is, whether Latino and women agents tend to be more considerate or abusive toward Latino migrants during their apprehension and detention. On the one hand, Latino agents have a closer ethnic link with Latino migrants than non-Latino agents do, which may produce an affinity with the migrants; but, on the other hand, Latino agents may act more aggressively toward Latino migrants than non-Latino agents in order to display their allegiance to the enforcement agency.

A second development to investigate concerns whether the decline in unauthorized immigration since 2005 affects the coercive predispositions of enforcement agencies. The falling numbers of apprehensions of unauthorized migrants in the Southwestern border area from 1,189,031 in 2005 to 340,252 in 2011 strongly suggest that unauthorized migration is dramatically slowing down (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2012, Table 35). This raises the question of whether the apparent decline in unauthorized immigration is lessening perceptions of a “Latino Threat” (see Chavez, Chapter 4) among immigration enforcement agencies, making them less coercive in their treatment of migrants.

Finally, a third development to investigate concerns the attitudinal change that occurred after the 2012 presidential election among several conservative political leaders regarding immigration reform. The reelection of President Obama due partly to the support of Latino and Latina voters signaled to some conservative leaders that they should be more considerate of Latino immigrant interests to get Latino political support. The research question to investigate from this perspective is whether the seemingly attitudinal change of the conservative leaders reverberates through state bureaucracies affecting their enforcement predispositions toward immigrant populations.

The overarching question that these research questions address concerns the extent to which contextual social changes may affect the coercive predispositions of enforcement bureaucracies. That is to say, do social, demographic, and attitudinal changes in the larger society affect the predispositions of coercive agencies or do these organizational bodies function more independently, operating with an ideology derived mainly within the social structure of the bureaucracy?