People Processing as State Capacity: Immigration Control in Canada and Sweden

• In Event: State Informational Capacity in Historical and Contemporary Governance

Abstract

This paper will explore a key function in state capacity: how bureaucracies render people as cases for purposes of processing them. Making people legible through administrative simplification is recognized as a vital element in how modern nation states make societies legible. It is central to how modern nation states rule over large and complex societies, where control is depersonalized and works over distances. Yet, in critical parts, it is underexplored.
The paper is structured in two parts. The first section reviews a diverse literature on people processing. It covers state formation and its relationship to information capacity such as population registration, discussions on the centrality of classifying people in the exercise of bureaucratic authority, as well as writings in street-level bureaucracy which identify labelling dynamics in the relationship between bureaucrats and clients. While there is extensive writing on the macro and micro levels, the paper argues that we lack a structured understanding of people processing on the critical meso level, in terms of how processing capacity is imagined, established and organized within public authorities.
The next part of the paper addresses this issue through an empirical study of the historical establishment of modern immigration control in Canada and Sweden, two internationally prominent countries in refugee reception. Migration, especially that of refugees, is an apt case, since it is a political issue centrally concerned with classifying and ordering subjects. Immigration control centers on selection, requiring a bureaucratic capacity to offer protection to desirable target populations: allowing wanted people and barring entry to unwanted people. It represents an administrative manifestation of controlling entry into the social closure of the modern nation state and is a crucial aspect of state capacity. It requires both bureaucratic capacity to render people as cases, as well as informational capacity in making people legible for processing. This is challenged by movement of people over national borders, offering a dynamic between governing and governed which is fruitful for studying the development of state capacity in practice.
Building on extensive archival research, the empirical data consists of material left by policymakers, officials and administrative courts. First, it details the historical origins and institutionalization of a new type of migration governing – how, from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, migration governing came to center on the idea of actively molding migration through making its subjects administratively legible. It covers the dynamics and challenges of establishing bureaucratic and informational capacity to transform migrants with wide-ranging experiences into uniform administrative identities. Secondly, it looks at the application of these systems of selection within administrative courts, exploring how courts deal with seemingly illegible individuals and turn human characteristics such as age and home into bureaucratic criteria. The paper is grounded in a historical institutionalist view of classification systems, meaning that it explores how Canadian and Swedish classification systems have been animated by enduring differences in welfare models, legal traditions and immigration histories. The results show how similar regulatory frameworks for processing refugees in Sweden and Canada were animated by enduring differences in immigration tradition, welfare models and administrative-legal traditions. This in turn has given rise to different moral vocabularies of what deserving refugee is. Refugeehood, rather than a neutral category, is a status which comes about through its regulation, and requiring state capacity to be enforced and reliably reproduced over time. The conclusion of the paper provides theoretical discussions on the organization of people processing, how it can be studied in a comparative perspective, and its role in state capacity.

Author

• Andreas Asplén Lundstedt