Shaping Borders: Migrants’ Agency, Time Commodification, and Anticipatory Detention Strategies

This article shows how the organizational activities that filter people through borders are shaped by anticipation of migrants’ agency. Through ethnographic research in the United Kingdom’s two largest immigration detention centers, I analyze implementation practices carried out by frontline workers of the Home Office. I question the underexamined relationship between time and organizational action. I find that implementation practices are systematized, in part, by assessments of the future, and are aimed at anticipating and countering detainees’ responses to the possibility of deportation, even before these responses surface. Detainees’ responses can slow the ideal progression of the bureaucratic processes of detention and expulsion, even as speeding up those processes remains a crucial concern of the Home Office organization, largely because of a political fantasy of cost-effectiveness. I argue that more knowledge about these sorts of implementation dynamics allows for reappraisals of policies that remain salient, despite their failures and costs.