Local public servants create and implement local programs to include migrants with a precarious legal status without access to fundamental rights such as work or housing. However, these programs do not grant access to rights by default. Bureaucratic evaluation divides the beneficiaries following meritocratic and moral criteria between those who “merit” access to rights and those who do not. Through these evaluations, even if people have been living in the city for years, they are “kept out”, producing social and racial orders as a border practice within the State (Balibar 2009, Aliverti 2021).
Based on interviews and an ethnography of the bureaucrats’ work, I tried to understand the role of emotions in facilitating the settlement and/or expulsion of people from the city. I ask how individual annoyance, obedience and mistrust shape the State intervention, the institutions, and the construction of the category of "migrant" during daily encounters between the bureaucrats and the beneficiaries, what I called an “affective bureaucracy”.
With a connection between the bureaucrat and the beneficiary mediated by rules and paperwork, bureaucrats find themselves in an unequal power relationship with their interlocutors. These contradictory emotions expose how the bureaucrats navigate between their personal agency and strict State regulations. I analyse what type of emotions are engaged to produce the difference between the citizens and the ones considered non-citizens in a more mundane context, when the State agents act as 'city gatekeepers', holding a discretionary power.
Focusing on street-level interventions (Lipsky 1980), this article aims to expose how an “affective bureaucracy” categorizes migrants, fragments State power, and increases individual and arbitrary power.
