Border Frictions

Gender, Generation and Technology on the Frontline

Karine Côté-Boucher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429648366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto dell'immigrazione

How did Canadian border officers come to think of themselves as a "police of the border"? This book tells the story of the shift to law enforcement in Canadian border control. From the 1990s onward, it traces the transformation of a customs organization into a border-policing agency.

Border Frictions investigates how considerable political efforts and state resources have made bordering a matter of security and trade facilitation best managed with surveillance technologies. Based on interviews with border officers, ethnographic work carried out in the vicinity of land border ports of entry and policy analysis, this book illuminates features seldom reviewed by critical border scholars. These include the fraught circulation of data, the role of unions in shaping the border policy agenda, the significance of professional socialization in the making of distinct generations of security workers and evidence of the masculinization of bordering. In a time when surveillance technologies track the mobilities of goods and people and push their control beyond and inside geopolitical borderlines, Côté-Boucher unpacks how we came to accept the idea that it is vital to deploy coercive bordering tactics at the land border.

Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, social theory, politics, and geography and appeal to those interested in learning about the everyday reality of policing the border.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Changing customs: a cultural shift at the border

I first began to sense the cultural shift in Canadian border control during my interview with William in 2010. An experienced border officer, William had spent most of his career in a port of entry located on the Eastern Canada–US border.¹ Like many of his other senior colleagues, he came from the area. William loved his job; in his words, he was “tattooed with the organization” he worked for, namely the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Throughout our conversation, he explained how things had changed since he started his career three decades earlier. Younger officers, he told me, now see themselves as “a police of the border.” William was not certain how the change had come along, but he shared a few clues: new recruits are told to expect “people of real bad faith” at the border and that the job would entail fighting drug trafficking and crime and finding missing children. In fact, William tells me, recruits are selected and trained to become enforcers. They come to work licensed to carry a gun and expecting to catch bad guys. He adds that officers, and especially recruits, now expect to be respected (i.e. feared), just like American border guards.²

In contrast, William explains, experienced officers like him were hired as public servants to collect duties and taxes. They were satisfied with their role protecting the national economy from unwanted foreign competition. If someone crossed the border while driving drunk, border officers could not arrest him. They were not trained to use physical defence tactics, nor did they carry firearms, handcuffs or batons. Older officers like William liked to tell me that when they were young, their main tool was a passport stamp. They now carry more than 15 pounds of gear and wear a navy-blue police-like uniform, a bulletproof vest that makes them appear bigger than they are and leather black boots. Either shaking their head in disbelief or with a hint of nostalgia, these officers told me stories of the time when they came to work in light-blue shirts and regular shoes.

As I listened to William and his colleagues, I came to a realization: how they approach their work is different and disconnected from what I had learned from reading policy documents and the academic literature on borders, security and transnational policing. Border officers all participate in “border security,” but they conceive of it differently. First, they disagree with each other on significant issues that run to the core of how borders are, and should be, policed—such as their mandate, the purpose of their work and their most important tasks and the best way to accomplish them. This variation is compounded by their diverse takes on what protecting the country means, what the risks are and how they categorize and act on such threats.

Second, when officers speak of security in policy parlance, they do so in law enforcement terms. Border officers working at the land border do not talk of algorithms or counterterrorism, nor do they speak of borders as if they were “smart” (that is reliant on technologies and capable of filtering risks) as North American and European policymakers would assume. Instead, they speak of the daily border processing and compliance work they do. In interview after interview, all of the officers described paperwork and boredom at the booth, telling tales of repetitive and uneventful days. But when officers spoke of guns, their expanded legal powers of arrest and the most recent time that they found drugs hidden in truck compartment, their eyes often lit up. These conversations often took a generational tone. While mid-career and older officers continued to speak about their public service role with pride, it was often the younger officers who discussed police-related themes with excitement.

Going along with fieldwork, I realized that I was doing research in a border control organization that was undergoing a transition. Perhaps this organization was moving towards “pre-emptive” bordering and the prevention of threats before they arrived at the border (or before they even occurred), as the literature on bordering would suggest. Above all, however, and when viewed from the frontline, this was an agency transitioning towards law enforcement. This transition remains controversial among officer ranks but also between officers, their union, management and government. The CBSA tells us that its job is about ensuring both security and facilitation. Accordingly, many of the officers I met are convinced that their work means letting travellers and trade in as swiftly as possible. Indeed, in overcrowded Canadian airports where waiting lines are the stuff of front-page news, officers who collect customs cards and whisk us through in a matter of seconds after we have answered a few questions at an automated border clearance (ABC) self-serve kiosk are called facilitators. Similarly, in the area of customs, the goal of enforcement enters into tension with other aims, such as removing impediments to smooth cargo traffic. But as far as most border officers are concerned, whether at the airport or at the land border, their job is not only to get stuff and people through but also to keep the line, to stay vigilant, to look for what seems out of the ordinary. When border officers told me that they were “a police of the border,” they meant that they can now enforce the law at the state’s limits and have the weapons to do so.

In this book, I argue that the shift towards enforcement is a major trend in border control, one that has become more and more significant over the years. We will see that bordering is a matter of technologized security and policing at a distance, but to the extent that it entails the ability to use force, to stop someone from moving and to search, question, arrest and detain, it is also more specifically concerned with law enforcement. Whether or not they use them, many officers take pride in these powers. This insistence on law enforcement by border officers indicates a perception of bordering as a tougher endeavour.

Focusing on the cultural shift towards enforcement, this book starts by asking a simple empirical question: what does the turn to border enforcement look like from the frontline? In investigating this turn, I also explore questions related to the recent history of contemporary changes in bordering and consider their effects for street-level border officials: How do border officers, and particularly those working customs, concretely handle the contradictory objectives of security and free trade? How do border officers deal with the adoption of new security technologies and border programmes that automatize and remove some part of their traditional tasks and discretion? What are the implications of these initiatives for the organization of work in ports of entry? Ultimately, these questions shed light on the forces that have been shaping the turn to enforcement as a strategy of mobility control not only for customs but for bordering in general.

I respond to these questions with interview material gathered in 2010 and 2011 with Canadian border officers working customs. Most of my interviewees are frontline border officers employed at the “commercial sections” of their port of entry; that is the way Canadian border authorities refer to those doing the work of customs and who are responsible for processing truck drivers, trucks and goods. In contrast to many countries where customs, border police and immigration officers are employees of different agencies, CBSA officers can be assigned to traffic, immigration, commercial or traveller processing. Commercial and immigration are generally seen as specializations because they require more-advanced legal and regulatory training. Further, Canada does not have an equivalent to the U.S. Border Patrol. The sections of the land border between ports of entry are patrolled by the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

The 33 interviews were conducted in French or in English onsite in five ports of entry on the Canada–US border located in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario.³ They generally lasted about one and a half to two hours, but a few went over three hours. I met 21 men and 12 women. The great majority of my interviewees were border officers, but this number includes five port-of-entry supervisors, one chief of operations and one clerical worker. Some of my interviewees had low-grade data analysis experience, and I mention this when necessary. However, to respect anonymity and given the limited number of supervisors in ports of entry, in this book, I refer to all supervisors as border officers. All supervisors started their career as border officers. The tracing of the trajectory of borderwork towards enforcement became possible because the majority of my interviewees were officers with an accumulated experience of 15 to 35 years in customs. Further, as most of my interviewees had spent time in traveller processing and some in immigration control before being transferred to the commercial sections of their ports of entry, they led me to think about what we learn from the changes that they saw happening in customs and what these changes say about broader transformations in border control. As further explained in Chapter 2, since its creation in 2003, the CBSA is responsible for all taxation, customs, immigration and border enforcement at the country’s ports of entry. Since the basic training of all frontline border officers is now related to the regulation of travellers and, with a slightly more specialized training, frontline immigration assessment, my conclusions can often be extended to the immigration and traveller control aspects of borderwork. I make the necessary distinctions between traveller migration control and cross-border trade regulation, when necessary.

In addition to these interviews, port-of-entry staff members offered me short tours of each site. I also spent between one and three weeks in the vicinity of each port that I visited. During this time, I discussed with locals and read regional newspapers. Archival research undertaken since that time provided legal jurisprudence, interpretations of border regulations and policy material. Recent civil rights and media reports, as well as continued informal conversations with border officers over the past nine years, suggest that the questions and issues that I explored during my research have kept their urgency and relevance.⁴

I locate this study in the global context of border control and do so by looking at the case of Canadian border services. Current scholarship is generally focused on the European and Mexico–US borders and pays particular attention to the control of aerial mobilities. It also speaks to the “mobile character of borders” (Pickering, Bosworth and Aas 2015: 382), so called because controls happen at a range of sites in a phenomenon that I elsewhere refer to as the “diffuse border” (Côté-Boucher 2008). So why focus on the uneventful Canada–US land border? First, the central-eastern Canada–US border is one of the busiest in the world for truck traffic: 10.9 million trucks transporting around Can$400 billion in value cross yearly and approximately 300,000 people cross daily.⁵ Such high-volume trade is now in logistical tension with a sensitive post-9/11 security context. It has also come under scrutiny with tariffs imposed on Canadian aluminium and steel by the US and the renegotiation of the now-called Canada–US–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) in 2018—which is expected to replace the previous accord (NAFTA) signed in 1994 between these countries. This case thus sheds light on the continuing importance of the land border as a site of border control.

Second, despite a large literature on the surveillance of human mobilities, customs remains understudied. To develop a more comprehensive appraisal of the kinds of privileges and vulnerabilities created by border control, we have to look at the second half of the equation: the securing of trade. It helps us to consider border control as a whole, since immigration, customs and traveller control often go hand in hand. By investigating how a recent political-economic agenda converted a taxation-focused customs into a global enterprise of security provision and trade facilitation, I make original contributions to the fields of criminology and of border, security and mobility studies.

Accordingly, the book investigates how the project of remaking customs and border control has created a group of frontline security professionals who think of themselves as law enforcers. It tells the story of how the considerable political effort and state resources deployed in this project have disrupted officers’ work processes and of the extent to which these street-level officials have resisted, adopted and altered this project to their own ends. It uncovers some unique dimensions of what is often referred to as the hardening of borders, by revealing the inside dynamics that created a new generation of border officers more enthused by the oppressive side of their work.

Beyond denunciation: towards a grounded critique of border control

This book contributes to the significant scholarship produced since the beginning of this century, critically assessing how political authorities demonstrate a growing interest in shaping, channelling, tracing and interdicting how we move across spaces, territories and borders (Kotef 2015). This critical orientation denotes an acute and shared awareness that, in contrast to received wisdom, borders make people vulnerable; from migrants who take increasingly risky routes to avoid controls to those whose travel lives and work lives are subjected to unprecedented border surveillance. Through these scholars’ collective efforts, we know that borders are increasingly mapped onto the social, economic and political divisions that make up our world. Indeed, we have learned that borders act as gendered, racialized and classed structures that enable the stratified classification of mobile people across the globe. We have also become more aware that borders contribute to the extension of state surveillance and that they sustain a transnational security governance detached from democratic oversight. Conceptually, this body of work is useful also because it sheds light on how contemporary borders interrogate traditional notions of sovereignty, citizenship and nation-building.

This book brings something else to the discussion. It adopts an alternative methodological sensibility, one that is anchored in an interpretive account of the shifting experiences of border control by frontline border actors. In doing so, I follow Mountz’s (2010: xx) apt invitation to incorporate the “institutional memories” and “the voice of civil servants” in analyses of bordering. Her ethnography demonst...