Between 1998 and 2003, following the Israeli government's yielding to pressure by Israeli employers, the presence of “foreigners”—termed, in the Interior Ministry jargon, “foreign workers” and “subjects” and, throughout this paper, sojourners Footnote ¹—in Israel sharply rose.Footnote ² In a gradual process that followed, sojourners began to be seen in the eyes of large segments of the Israeli media and policymakers as a “social problem.”Footnote ³ Despite the number of sojourners being far from clear—estimates ran between 140,000 to more than 300,000—expressions such as “social time bomb,” “demographic danger,” and “a threat to the Jewish nature of the state” became prevalent in Israeli media and among politicians.Footnote ⁴ By 2003, the political stage was set for introducing a limited state of exception; namely, a deportation campaign targeting the sojourners. In August 2002, following a direct order from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an Immigration Police force with some 400 officers and an annual budget of $100 million was established. In the ensuing years, more than 80,000 sojourners, who had been staying and working in Israel without a permit, have been deported in a combined effort by the Ministry of Internal Defense and the Interior Ministry.

Giorgio Agamben discusses the state of exception as an increase in the power governments and state bureaucracies wield during real or ostensible times of crisis.Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, especially since 9/11, increased fear of terrorism caused nation-states to heighten the securitization of international travel and adopt more stringent laws and regulations to control the global flow of people.Footnote ⁶ This paper focuses on bureaucratic power and the bureaucratic mechanisms underlying the deportation process in an attempt to link social process and outcomes, state bureaucracies, and emotions and affect. By looking at the bureaucratic personnel of the Enforcement Unit of the Interior Ministry and how they come to terms with their role, which is to facilitate the forced arrest and deportation of men and women who are staying or working in Israel without a legal visa, I discuss how this state of exception is realized. I claim that through complex ideological mechanisms, state bureaucrats are able to justify their decisions and govern their emotions in a way that makes the deportation process manageable and even desirable.

Michel Foucault claims that governmentality is concerned with population and the welfare of the population.Footnote ⁷ Foucault observes that the modern state operates through the “triangle, sovereignty–discipline–government, which has as its primary target the population and its essential mechanism the apparatus of security.”Footnote ⁸ However, not all people come under the definition of population. The art of government is certainly not interested in the welfare of sojourners, who are not seen as part of the collective deserving social benefits. In this sense, although deporting sojourners is an inherent part of governmentality, it is, in a sense, where governmentality also ends. As Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, all states are predicated on the distinction between citizens and strangers. Strangers, who are always present yet unfamiliar, evoke emotions of fear and apprehension because they are seen as uncontrollable.Footnote ⁹ This distinction, essential for a national sense of belonging, stands at the base of the state's struggle to control the borders and ensure that only authorized people may enter and reside within its precinct, relinquishing all pretense to govern the “strangers.”

Governmentality can also be seen as pertaining to the “correct” conduct of oneself. In this sense, the creation of a rational conscience subject is the apex of the project of the state.Footnote ¹⁰ This is the conjunction where emotions and affect become intertwined in the ideological governing of the state. As Ann Laura Stoler notes, the role of the state in educating consent among citizens is achieved through “shaping appropriate and reasoned affect, by directing affected judgment, by severing some affective bonds and establishing others, by adjudicating what constituted moral sentiments—in short, by educating the proper distribution of sentiments and desires.”Footnote ¹¹ The ability to normalize state bureaucrats to view themselves as moral human beings is an important element in the state's ability to carry out a process of deportation (or any other large-scale project). Deporting a sojourner, especially one who has become rooted in Israel, is not easy, and border control officers are not immune to sentiments of guilt, pity, and pain. The sight of weeping sojourners begging to remain in the country does not leave them indifferent. However, such feelings do not lead them to neglect what they see as their duty: to protect the Israeli population from the “foreigner onslaught.” In this paper I attempt to understand the “educating” and normalizing forces that shape the ways bureaucrats feel, think, and act. I claim that, in turn, those emotions, thoughts, and actions, after being produced and reproduced, create the Israeli immigration regime.Footnote ¹²

With an eye to the mundane activities of state bureaucratic personnel, I emphasize that in order to understand the “State” we must look both at the organizations that compose the state and at the individuals who act within those bureaucracies. However, when literature in the social sciences and the humanities deals with immigration policies implemented by nation-states, it tends to focus on the political, economic, and ethnic interests that motivate these policies, the raison d’État, as well as on the ramifications of such polices; rarely do scholars investigate the interpersonal processes and everyday practices that shape states’ policies from the bottom up, through everyday interactions and discretionary decision-making. But, as James Ferguson and Akhil GuptaFootnote ¹³ and Timothy MitchellFootnote ¹⁴ convincingly point out, states are not monolithic entities with clear and distinct boundaries that should be studied only at the macro level. Rather, states and state power are built at symbolic and corporeal borders and conjunctures, through interactions between state bureaucrats and citizens, denizens, residents, and sojourners in the states’ demarcated territory. Thus, the policewoman writing a ticket, the bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry accepting or rejecting a naturalization request, the park ranger enforcing a non-hunting statute on disempowered sojourners, are all not only metonymic of the state but also combine to create the state and state power.

State power, of course, is always limited and checked. Globalization, as a field of study, tended traditionally to stress the overall decline in state power in relation to transnational powers on the one hand, and local or regional entities on the other.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, the nation-state has been stripped of many of its traditional erstwhile authorities and responsibilities, especially regulating the mobility of people, capital, and information. The neoliberalization process that many Western countries have been undergoing in the last three decades curtailed the services the state offers to those living within its purview.Footnote ¹⁶ However, as Aihwa Ong avers, “the nation-state—with its supposed monopoly over sovereignty—remains a key institution in structuring spatial order.”Footnote ¹⁷

Thus, it is important to remember that the decline in state power and the waning of the social services it provides often make it even more important to enhance the distinction between those “deserving” to enjoy the limited social goods the state continues to offer and those who should be prevented from benefiting from them.Footnote ¹⁸ This creates a struggle over “belonging” and “deservedness,” often based on ethnic and religious ideologies, which frames my paper.

Israel is an interesting case study of countries attempting to deport sojourners forcefully. On the one hand, it differs from most Western countries in the sense that its national identity, despite receiving authentication and empowerment from the Jewish past, is both new and in a state of flux.Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, it is defined as an immigration country, but only for the dominant ethnic group (Jews). On the other hand, Israel, like many other Western countries, is a recent state of immigration and as such has to create the rules of the game in a hurry.

Between September 2006 and November 2007, I studied the Tel Aviv District of the Enforcement Unit of the Interior Ministry, sitting in on hundreds of interrogations and everyday activities of the unit and interviewing state bureaucrats. In what follows I will shed light on some of the bureaucratic processes that shape Israel's immigration policies and explain how state bureaucrats, who view themselves as moral human beings, can participate, day in and day out, in practices that uproot individuals from their loved ones and from their sources of livelihood.

Field, Informants, and Methodology

The Interior Ministry in Israel has five district Enforcement Units, each in charge of a region of Israel Proper: Northern Israel, Tel Aviv, Central District, Jerusalem, and Southern Israel. Of them, the Tel Aviv unit is by far the largest and most active, leading in both the number of border control officers and in the number of arrests. The Tel Aviv headquarters is located in an industrial part of the city of Holon, near Tel Aviv, and is adjacent to the local branch of the Immigration Police. The physical proximity cultivated a similar state of mind between the two agencies, and, indeed, they work in tandem to deport as many visaless sojourners as possible. There were roughly a dozen border control officers working in the Tel Aviv Enforcement Unit, most of them men in their late twenties and early thirties. In order to protect the identity of border control officers, the names and gender of the informants have been changed and physical description minimized.Footnote ²⁰

Border control officers work in shifts, and the Holon headquarters tends to be manned at all times. The majority of the interrogations, however, are done during the morning and early afternoon hours. The headquarters comprises a long corridor with five adjacent cubicles for questioning that run the length of it, two offices for the senior border control officers, a small kitchen, and a larger common office where border control officers gather when work is slow. The common office also serves as an extra interrogation room during “rush hours” when all other stations are occupied. There is a heavy metal door leading to the nondescript outdoor parking lot, and a visitor needs to buzz the intercom to be let in. However, this door is rarely used, as most entrants arrive through the door connecting the headquarters with the Immigration Police, and during my visits I sometimes had to pound on the door for several minutes until I was heard. A typical interrogation takes fifteen to twenty minutes, but, in complicated cases, it can last over an hour. At the end of each questioning, a decision is printed in Hebrew and the detainee is asked (but not coerced) to sign it. During a busy morning, more than twenty people can noisily occupy the space of the Enforcement Unit: border control officers interrogating sojourners, filling paperwork, or speaking on the phone; police escorting sojourners or contemplating an operation; and detained sojourners in the middle of an interrogation. Often a pandemonium of shouts, screams, sobbing, and consternated voices prevails. At other times, tense silence disturbed only by a piercing question is observed. And yet at other times, a relaxed atmosphere is present, usually when there are few or no detained sojourners in the premises.

During my fieldwork I was present at over 750 interrogations of sojourners staying and working in Israel without a proper visa, and I interviewed most of the border control officers in the Tel Aviv unit. I usually came in the early morning, but on some occasions, I arrived during the evening or in the middle of the night. I took notes during interrogations but did not record the interactions. During the “dead hours” when there was little to do I paid attention to the routine conversations in the facility and interviewed the border control officers.

The Job of Border Control Officers

The job of the border control officers is divided into pre-detention activities and the interrogation of detained sojourners. The pre-detention activities include preparing files on people suspected of being illegal sojourners, joining the Immigration Police in raids on addresses where undocumented labor migrants are allegedly present,Footnote ²¹ and checking the details of apprehended individuals in Aviv, the computerized Population Administration system. Border control officers stop incoming passengers at the Ben-Gurion Airport and interrogate sojourners detained in the streets for not possessing a valid visa, and they are the ones who hand to the soon-to-be-deported their deportation orders. Border control officers implement the policies set by the Interior Ministry, but because Israel is, officially, not a country of immigration and as such has no comprehensive and cohesive immigration policy for non-Jews,Footnote ²² the border control officers have a considerable amount of discretion in their decisions, which can only be overruled by a court order. After a person is detained, he or she is brought to the offices of the Enforcement Unit for questioning. During the questioning, bureaucrats of the Enforcement Unit have a clear-cut job. Based on several criteria—for example, duration of stay in Israel, time elapsed since the visa expired, presence of minor children—the border control officers need to decide whether to permit sojourners to stay in the country (usually, by temporarily legalizing his or her status) or to deport them.

Border control officers all regard their job with the utmost seriousness, and, during my research, several of them referred to themselves as the “gatekeepers of the Israeli State.” Their role cannot be seen as separate from the explicit goal of the Enforcement Unit, which is to deport as many visaless sojourners as possible. Given the overly ambitious and impossible quotas the Interior Ministry and the Immigration Police set for the numbers of annual deportees, the border control officers attempt to deport as many sojourners as they can. However, in some cases, other institutions, regulations, and personal and organizational sentiments limit their ability to deport.Footnote ²³

As Michael Herzfeld notes, state bureaucracies distinguish between insiders and outsiders, locals and strangers, the deserving and the undeserving.Footnote ²⁴ Border control officers mentally distinguish between Israelis and “subjects.” Their role, as they see it, is to protect the former from the latter. During a questioning of a visaless sojourner from Ghana who was caught working in a restaurant and explained that he was sending back money to his family in Africa, a border control officer named David stated, “I know you are not [sic] bad person, and you want to earn money for your family, but please … understand that I have to take care of Israelis’ [jobs].” Evidently, in the eyes of border control officers, there are Israelis, who are part of the “population” (in the Foucauldian sense) and deserve to enjoy social benefits (e.g., the right to employment), and there are sojourners, who stand where governmentality ends and should not be taken into consideration when policies are involved. Consequently, border control officers learn to view sojourners staying in the country illegally as menacing individuals who need to be deported.

Despite this, the interrogation process is often rife with emotion. Still, with very few exceptions, border control officers send the illegal sojourner to prison to await deportation. In order to be able to perform their “duty” properly, border control officers need a mechanism that will enable them to continue to view themselves as moral human beings. The contradiction between the sentiments of pain, guilt, and sorrow that sojourners often evoke among border control officers and what they perceive as their duty is addressed through several mechanisms: simplifying social reality by creating clear dichotomies, contextualizing the suffering of sojourners by weaving it into the Zionist project, and governing (some of the) emotions and rendering them irrelevant to the decision process.

Bureaucratic Structural Binary Land

As James Scott points out, “Certain forms of knowledge require a narrowing of vision.”Footnote ²⁵ Bureaucracies need clear-cut definitions and categories to simplify social reality and implement policies. Clear categories also protect border control officers from the realization that they are responsible for decisions that determine the fate of others, thus potentially harming their equitable self-image. Having only two mutually exclusive categories simplifies social reality considerably. Not surprisingly, the logic of the Israeli Enforcement Unit and its practices is almost invariably binary. The Enforcement Unit employs three binary divisions in its daily operations: Israelis versus foreigners, legals versus illegals, and deportable versus undeportable. However, these divisions are far from natural, unproblematic categories. Rather, they are often produced and reified by the actions of bureaucrats.

The first binary division can be deduced from the full name of the unit, the Enforcement Unit for Foreigners (emphasis added), which divides people in Israel into two categories: Israelis and foreigners. Of course, there are many other social and legal subcategories to define people living inside Israel: tourists, permanent residents, exchange students, Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, etc. It can also be claimed that there is a fine line between Israelis and “foreigners” and that many individuals are positioned in the fuzzy borderland between these two categories. However, for the sake of delineating a line demarcating the regulatory power of the Enforcement Unit,Footnote ²⁶ this compartmentalization of people into one of the two identities proves very useful. The regulatory power of the Enforcement Unit is limited to foreigners, be they tourists, exchange students, asylum seekers, or labor migrants; Israelis are not under their authority. The first task of border control officers is to determine whether a person is a foreigner or not: to uncover any falsified identity cards, to find out whether a naturalization process has been completed, or to check whether a woman who speaks perfect Hebrew is, indeed, really an Israeli citizen. Bureaucrats in the Visas Department of the Interior Ministry follow the same logic when they try to determine whether a marriage is fictitious or authentic, and whether a person asking to naturalize has a Jewish grandfather.Footnote ²⁷ The question of whether a person is an Israeli or a “foreigner” must be answered, bureaucratically, by either a yes or a no. The presence of the imagined (but not imaginary) line between the two categories simplifies the work of border control officers considerably.

Once the first task has been completed and the border control officer “knows” that he or she has regulatory power over a detained “foreigner,” the second binary division needs to be made: Is the person detained staying in the country legally or illegally? Thus, sojourners are divided into those who have permission to stay and sometimes to work in Israel on a temporary basisFootnote ²⁸ and those who are doing so surreptitiously and unlawfully. These bureaucratic-judicial categories make the job of border control officers easy and straightforward. If a sojourner is staying in the country legally, he or she should be permitted to remain in the country until her or his visa expires. Otherwise, deportation is in order.

The regulatory power of border control officers is not limited to determining whether a “subject” is legal or not. These bureaucrats also possess the power to change the identity of people and move them from one category to the other, often on the basis of their being “deserving” or not. Thus, a Chinese citizen who has entered Israel as a migrant worker with a construction work visa can have his visa revoked, moving him to the illegal category, should he be caught working in a restaurant. Reverse cases, although more rare, also occur. A woman who lost her visa because her employer passed away can be legalized and given two weeks to find a new employer (thus regaining a more permanent legal status).Footnote ²⁹ This regulatory power of changing the legal status of a sojourner depends on the third binary division.

The third binary division is an operative one (i.e., it is a call for action) and is used when border control officers decide whether the sojourner who is staying in Israel unlawfully can and should be deported or released. There are several cases where a sojourner without a visa would not be deported. The first is that he or she will cease to be illegal (as in the example of the caregiver whose employer died, given above). This is usually done with sojourners who are seen as “deserving”: those who have been in Israel legally for a relatively short time (typically fewer than three years), have maintained a legal status throughout, and have lost their employer recently and seem to have earnestly attempted to find a new lawful employer. In other cases, people are given permission to stay in the country for a limited time in return for becoming collaborators with the Immigration Police.Footnote ³⁰ Another reason for not deporting a sojourner may take into consideration the harm that will be suffered by the Israeli employer should a worker be deported, as can be seen by Dori's quotation above. In this case, although the Filipina worker violated her visa terms and, in theory, should have lost her visa, the circumstances led the border control officer to refrain from changing her status to illegal and deporting her. When a border control officer deems that a sojourner should not be deported, the bureaucrat usually legalizes the latter's status (or keeps it intact in the cases where it was legal). Other sojourners released are people who, despite being illegally in the country, are “undeportable.” This could be a man from Sudan or Ethiopia who is under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or a single mother of a minor who cannot be arrested because there will be no one to take care of the minor, or someone released by the court because, for one reason or another, he or she could not be deported to his or her country of origin.

Because the role of border control officers (like most other bureaucrats) is to quickly arrive at clear-cut decisions, the binaries become the embodiment of the bureaucratic logic and are viewed as clear and all-encompassing. Israelis are entitled to remain in the country indefinitely; foreigners are by definition temporary aliens; legals are the “good foreigners,” while illegals are the “bad guys” (ra'im in Hebrew, a term often used by border control officers), who should be deported if possible. These binaries are so pervasive that Dror, a border control officer, confessed to me:

To some extent, binary categories relieve border control officers from having to use their discretion but, more importantly, the categorizations described help bureaucrats perceive themselves as moral human beings by breaking the deportation process into a series of “common sense” steps. First, the sojourner is defined as non-Israeli, then as illegal, then as deportable. In these stages, the question of the morality of the deportation and of those who deport rarely comes into play. The duty of border control officers is only to determine the status of the sojourner. The rest is not their responsibility.

A critical review of these binary abstractions will reveal that these categories obfuscate a far more nuanced and blurry social reality. Thus, the bureaucratic fine line that ostensibly separates Israelis from sojourners, when seen through nonbureaucratic eyes, turns out to be anything but a fine line. Sometimes a person (or his or her parents or grandparents) converted, but the rabnut, the Orthodox establishment, contests or rejects the validity of the conversion, and hence his or her claim for citizenship. At other times, Palestinians lack documents to prove their Israeli citizenship, and in other cases the naturalization process is still ongoing and the person in question is in a liminal position. Is a labor migrant who has lived in Israel for ten years, speaks fluent Hebrew, and has a child in a Jewish school, less Israeli than a Jewish immigrant from Russia who has only been in Israel for two years, cannot speak the language, and dreams of emigrating to America? State bureaucrats are aware of this, of course, and they realize that many of their decisions on whether a person is an Israeli or a “foreigner” are often arbitrary or contentious, or both. However, this formalization of matters of legality, collective identity, and belonging into a dichotomous model enables the simplification of complex social dilemmas (but also creates personal tragedies and acts of state aggression).

Similarly, in bureaucratic eyes, the categories of legality and illegality are imagined as discrete and never overlapping. There are only two questions that police officers from the Immigration Police need to answer when deciding if a transnational migrant is legal or not: Does the person they stopped have a valid visa to stay and work in the country? Is he or she violating the terms of this visa? Here again, this dichotomous categorization may be questioned. For example, perhaps some violations of the conditions of the visa do not warrant its cancellation, or maybe the line between legality and illegality is porous because some people can legalize their status with relative ease. Furthermore, a person can be legal in some aspects and illegal in others,Footnote ³¹ or his or her legal status may be a matter of discretion. Should a person who has been caught hunting illegally be deported or just fined? Should a person who entered the country deceitfully, claiming to be of Jewish origin, but in the meantime married a Jewish citizen, be considered to be staying in the country legally? And should a person who crossed the border illegally from Egypt to seek political asylum be considered a refugee or an infiltrator? All these are questions that the crude bureaucratic binary division fails to consider properly, but the binary categorization process also obviates these questions.

The reason that bureaucrats do not adopt a critical view of the bureaucratic binary categories is that they need to retain a positive self-image to keep doing their job. Deporting people is not an easy task, and border control officers need to remain convinced that they are “doing the right thing” or “the lesser evil,” as they sometimes term it. One strategy for achieving this is to divide the world into binary moral-legal sets of oppositions: good and bad, worthy and unworthy. Israelis and “foreigners,” and legal and illegal, are all structural oppositions that define a person a priori and define his or her rights to remain in the country permanently (Israelis), or temporarily (sojourners with a legal visa), or point out that he or she needs to be deported (sojourners without a visa). This overarching categorization thus obviates, or at least mitigates, the need for compassion, discretion, and constant moral evaluation by border control officers of the people detained and, perhaps more importantly, of themselves.

The Power to Define Context

During the interrogations, border control officers ask the detained sojourners personal questions regarding their status, the length of time they have been in Israel, how they entered the country, and many other questions deemed pertinent. The structure of the interrogation is always in the form of questions and answers. The information conveyed during the interactions between sojourners and border control officers can be divided into three complementary bodies of knowledge: text, context, and syntax.

Text refers to the individual story of the detainee, which reflects and describes the particularities of the life story of each person before coming to Israel and once inside Israel. Details such as country of origin, economic status, marital status, number of years inside Israel, and age are all parts of the text that are seen by border control officers as important and relevant, but others, such as why the person decided to migrate, how the migration occurred, how much he or she paid to obtain the visa (and, consequently, is he or she still in debt), and his or her life vicissitudes in Israel, except for the work status, are almost never asked, despite being an important part of the text. The reason for this is that much of this type of information—life in the country of origin, reasons for migrating, economic hardships—is deemed irrelevant to answer the two main questions border control officers are concerned with. Is the “subject” illegal? And, is the “subject” deportable?Footnote ³² These questions are linked to the bureaucrats’ attempt to receive clear answers to help them decide on the three binary categories discussed in the previous section. Additionally, in the rare cases where sojourners are permitted to relate their personal life histories, border control officers tend to view the accounts as fictional stories that cannot be believed.

Syntax refers to the way the story is told and is affected by the dramatic and histrionic capabilities of the sojourner and by his or her command of Hebrew and English. Thus, the same life story can be told stolidly or with strong emotions; dramatically or stoically. Some sojourners relate a compelling narrative, while others have difficulties describing the most basic details. In the Enforcement Unit, syntax and the text that was offered voluntarily by the sojourners take a backseat to context. The text and syntax may affect the sentiments felt by border control officers and cause them to feel outrage (when they feel a sojourner has exploited the state or is trying to deceive them), or empathy and compassion (when they feel the sojourner was a victim), but, as I will demonstrate, the context informs the ultimate decision and is the main factor through which the texts are interpreted.

Context describes the general aspect of a story—its relation to a metanarrative. Humans need subjective contexts to understand social reality. Religion, ideology, and different theories all serve as context for the understanding of the world around us. Social institutions such as schools, churches, and newspapers all contextualize events and standardize the way people interpret lived experiences by embedding those experiences within metanarratives. Contextualizing social facts (as well as “natural” ones) is part of the interpretation process people need to go through in order to be able to “understand” these facts. The power to define the context refers to the ability of institutions (in this case, state bureaucracies) to inculcate in individuals a metanarrative, or a set of metanarratives, that will serve as the prism to interpret and understand social reality. This results in a shared worldview, or a habitus, that creates, changes, or sustains social practices.Footnote ³³

Despite the fact that structural binary categorizations can blunt any emotions felt by border control officers for the deportations they are facilitating, many may still feel shame, uneasiness, and misgivings, which can impede their everyday work. Putting the presence of “subjects” in the context of Zionism (to be sure, one particular form of Zionism) turns every single deportation from a private matter of a suffering individual who is often a victim of Israeli politics into part of the everlasting Israeli struggle for sovereignty and Jewish hegemony. Border control officers limit the empathy they feel toward the luckless sojourners by subjugating their experiences to the larger Zionist project. The Zionist project, as context, emphasizes the quest of the Jews for a state of their own and views Israel as the realization of Jewish national yearning for a homeland. The process of nation building and “salvaging the land” has been fraught with dangers and threats, most notably the Arab threat. In this light, the plight of gentile migrants in Israel is viewed through the national Zionist prism that considers migration of non-Jews a threat to Jewish hegemony and to the Zionist dream of “being a free people in our country, the country of Zion and Jerusalem,” as the words of the Israeli national anthem go. This is why border control officers see themselves, in the last instance, as the gatekeepers of Israel.

In the interactions between border control officers and sojourners it is the state bureaucrats who can make the Zionist context into a social fact.Footnote ³⁴ They are representing the state and they can imprison and deport the sojourners. The detainees, in contrast, have little control over the contextualization of their narrative. They may possess a completely different context to explain their plight, but without the state apparatus to back them, they have no power to force their context on others or to translate their context into actions.

Zionism as context is not unique to the Enforcement Unit or to the Interior Ministry; most Israeli Jews consider themselves to be Zionists. However, applying Zionism as a context to every questioning of a sojourner mutes the personal text of the detainee and mitigates its importance because the personal story is subjugated to a larger, national metanarrative. Other metanarratives that could contextualize the movement of people—such as transnational capitalism that divides the world into First World and Third World countries, or globalization—are not ignored but take a backseat when bureaucrats explain and order transnational migration to Israel. The dominance of the Zionist context means that individual cases of injustice, or cases that evoke empathy, are not seen necessarily as requiring the release of the detainee, permitting him or her to remain in the country. The notion that the presence of “foreigners” is endangering the Jewish character of the state, that it facilitates mixed marriages, and that it increases unemployment among citizens, all emanating from a particular reading of the Zionist context, causes border control officers to imprison and deport the vast majority of detained sojourners. It is based on this contextualization that border control officers view themselves as the gatekeepers who protect the collective from a mass influx of “foreigners.” As gatekeepers, their job is to make sure that “foreigners” do not compete with Israelis for jobs and that Jewish dominance remains unchallenged.

The subjugation of personal stories (text) and the way they are told (syntax) to the Zionist context plays an important role in the ability of border control officers to continue deporting people on a daily basis by supplying them with a rationale that justifies the deportation process. This rationale does not make the bureaucrats immune to the pain and suffering of the sojourners, but it helps them maintain an equitable self-image even when they are knowingly contributing to this suffering. Defining Zionism as the overarching context through which all texts will be examined enables border control officers to see themselves as doing the “dirty” but nonetheless essential job of being the gatekeepers of Israel.

Stories and Truths

The word story plays an important role in the work of border control officers because it serves to mitigate the veracity of the accounts (texts) told by the sojourners. “I don't believe your story,” “Stop making up stories,” and “Nice story, too bad you just made it all up,” are just a few of the expressions I heard border control officers use to the detainees on numerous occasions. Viewing the texts related by detained sojourners as a story helps the officers of the Enforcement Unit send most people they interrogate to prison and, later, deport them without feeling uncomfortable. After all, even if based on reality, a story is nonetheless fictional.

The “stories” related by the sojourners are invariably never backed up by documents, a fact that adds to their suspect nature in the eyes of the state bureaucrats. Scott's concept of legibility proves especially pertinent here. According to Scott, states, through their bureaucracies, coerce legibility on subjects and force them to cope with forms of knowledge they are unaccustomed to.Footnote ³⁵ In the case of the Interior Ministry, the legibility is achieved—or, as usually is the case, not achieved—through documents (passports, identity cards, birth certificates, and the like). The subjective nature of the “stories” is contrasted with the factual and objective ontological status of the documents that prove that the sojourners are staying and working in Israel without a valid visa.

Just as with an enthralling story, the border control officers usually shed the memories of the detainees once they are out of the office. Consequently, even a story of a woman who was sexually taken advantage of by her employer would tend to raise suspicions. Border control officers regard most detainees' accounts as an attempt to evade deportation. “If she has really been abused, why didn't she report it earlier?” a border control officer asked me after a detained Filipina complained that the son of her employer used to forcibly kiss her and fondle her breasts through her clothes. “Why did she wait until she was arrested?” Moreover, even if the border control officer happens to believe a detainee and feel sorry for him or her, this emotion would not be seen as “relevant” to decision-making, because the fictitious and undocumented nature of the account removed it, at least somewhat, from the realm of reality.

The following excerpt from my field notes serves to explain the importance of story for the deportation process.

Except for one Kenyan, who arrived in Israel three months before the rest of the group and received protection from UNHCR, all the Kenyans who were apprehended were sent to prison, where they would remain until their application to receive refugee status would be handled by UN personnel. This is congruent with the bureaucratic motto of the Enforcement Unit and the “we deport whomever we can” attitude. The fact that all those who could be arrested had been arrested testifies to the relatively marginal role that migrants' texts and contexts play in the decision making. This is partly because the personal stories of sojourners are seen as stories that are ontologically the opposite of truths. They may masquerade themselves as truths, they may even seem truths, but their fictitious nature prevents them from being anything but a false and misleading representation of reality. Unlike the documents, which are legible to the bureaucrats, personal stories are local knowledge that is usually not taken into account in the decision making.

Governance of Emotions

Michael Herzfeld claims that often the salient feelings of bureaucrats toward “outsiders” they interact with in their everyday work is that of indifference.Footnote ³⁶ In Israel, border control officers have to cope with a wide range of emotions toward sojourners. Because they share a contextual outlook that emphasizes Zionist ideologies and buttresses their view of themselves as Israel's gatekeepers, border control officers often experience intense feelings toward the migrants they interrogate. While emotions of compassion and empathy are played down when border control officers reach a decision pertaining to the deportation process of sojourners, strong negative emotions play a role in the bureaucratic decision-making. My study reveals that the bureaucratic Zionist context of the Enforcement Unit causes border control officers to be less affected by feelings of compassion and sympathy. This does not mean that a bureaucrat who works in the Enforcement Unit will remain indifferent to the story of a woman who related her misery (although this sometimes occurs), but, rather, that despite feeling empathy for her plight, the border control officers will not view these feelings as justification for releasing a person from prison or suspending the deportation. In other words, emotions of mercy are almost never included in the repertoire of emotions that affect the border control officers' decisions. Feelings of wrath and indignation, on the other hand, are kindled much more easily and often influence the border control officers’ decisions. Furthermore, often the prominence of the feelings of indignation toward the detained migrants for “taking advantage of the state” neutralizes any feelings of compassion border control officers may have toward migrants. For example, after an especially impassioned interrogation where Miki vituperated the detained sojourner, a Ghanaian in his forties, I approached the border control officer and remarked that he looked out of breath. He replied, “For the money I'm getting paid, I should remain indifferent, but I just can't. I see the insolence of these people and I get annoyed. They think that they deserve everything. No matter, perhaps in Ghana he will realize how lucky he was to even be here.” Obviously, the disposition of Miki was anything but indifferent.

However, as noted above, border control officers also experience feelings of compassion and empathy toward the detained sojourners. Indeed, feelings such as compassion, empathy, and uncertainty are an integral part of the work of border control officers as much as feeling such as rage and indignation are. It is true that after a while, as Dror confessed to me, interrogating scared people, signing arrest orders, and processing deportations become quite routine and normal, but that doesn't altogether blunt the emotions being evoked. While it is simple to understand how the emotions of indignation and wrath are played out to underpin the deportation process, it is also important to explain how border control officers are able to overlook (but not “overfeel”) the benevolent set of emotions. In other words, how do state bureaucrats govern their emotions in a way that will enable them to carry out their role in the deportation process?

Clearly, not all emotions are viewed by the state apparatus as equally legitimate. While emotions of wrath and indignation are seen as an extension of the Zionist ethos, and border control officers are implicitly encouraged by the senior bureaucrats to act on them, compassion is seen as a personal weakness that needs to be overcome. Because compassion is understood as a personal weakness of a particular bureaucrat, letting it affect the decision is greatly discouraged (although not completely forbidden).

When a border control officer “feels weak,” feeling empathy towards the detained sojourner, he or she makes this feeling known to others, who in turn help him or her govern these emotions by evoking the Zionist context and the fact that they must all follow the procedures. One pertinent example occurred when Moti announced that he felt sorry for a sojourner who worked in the sex industry and was raped by her employer (she was permitted to stay a year in Israel in return for testifying against her employer, but was arrested after this period ended). Pini explained to him, “You may be in a humanistic mood, but don't forget that she is a whore who spread sexually transmitted diseases.”

When exposed to heart-moving (and reliable-sounding) accounts, border control officers do not remain unmoved, but the final decision is nonetheless almost invariably to arrest and deport. “What, do you think that I didn't feel like shit?” Rami asked me, somewhat defensively. He was a junior border control officer at the end of an especially moving hearing of a Chinese woman who was in Israel for three months working as a domestic cleaner after entering with a tourist visa. The woman begged for mercy, explaining that she left her children at her parents’ and borrowed a lot of money, thinking she would receive a work visa. After consulting a more senior border control officer and learning that “there is nothing to do,” Rami sighed and signed an arrest order.

Over time, border control officers learn to govern their emotions. The Zionist context, coupled with the fact that they are operating in an open space where others can witness and criticize their weakness, prevents them from basing their decisions on feelings of compassion. Thus, a border control officer who related to me the difficult position he was put in on the previous day when an African woman sank to the floor, knelt in front of him, and started to kiss his feet, sobbing and begging him not to deport her, added curtly, “It's tough. It's tough. But, at least, when you are together [with other border control officers] you can get encouragement and support from the others. You are not alone.”

The longer a border control officer is part of the system, the better he or she will learn to govern his or her unruly feelings of empathy, and the fewer qualms he or she will have when deporting sojourners without a proper visa. Governing emotions is part of the everyday socialization modern citizens go through. Boys are taught not to yield to the desire to cry, soldiers are taught to master their fears, and adults learn to control their feelings in public. Border control officers learn, through the prism of Zionism and through their peers, that emotions of compassion and empathy toward visaless sojourners are illegitimate, and, if they cannot be avoided altogether, they should at least not affect the final decision regarding the deportation process. It is the success of this socializing of governance of compassionate emotions toward sojourners that enables the deportation process to be so effective.

Where Governmentality Ends

The Foucauldian definition of governmentality does not explicitly include the concept of bureaucratic governance; rather, it focuses on self-governance and self-control.Footnote ³⁷ Governmentality (or, more specifically, neoliberal governmentality) creates responsible citizens that conduct their everyday lives in a satisfactory manner. In this light, one of the most important tasks of state bureaucracies throughout the world is to produce self-governing subjects through various state apparatuses. One major role of the penitentiary system, for example, is rehabilitation, enabling the convicted criminal to lead a normative life once he or she is released from prison. Sojourners, especially those considered by border control officers to be illegal, mark the exception of governing but also the end of governmentality. Sojourners mark the exception of governing because they can be handled by emergency laws that are outside of the canonic body of law,Footnote ³⁸ but they also demarcate a certain type of people: those who are seen by some of the state bureaucracies as unmanageable. It is not only that sojourners are seen as corrupt, untrustworthy, and unlawful people—border control officers view the majority of them as incorrigible. This is why imprisonment of sojourners is not seen as an act of correction, nor of punishment. Rather, sojourners are sent to prison as the first step in the only way the state can cope with those who cannot be governed: banishment.

The main weapon state bureaucracies throughout the world wield in the war they wage to govern populations is documentation. Files, be they paper or computer, represent the modern form of control of both individuals and nations.Footnote ³⁹ The information stored in the files contains not only the rules and regulations, but also, and perhaps more importantly, data on individuals, both those who are law-abiding and those whose behavior must be corrected. Without this data, the bureaucratic apparatuses would be unable to govern properly because it would be impossible to know on whom to wield the normalizing power. In Israel, when transnational migrants are brought before a border control officer for interrogation, the worst offense they can be accused of is to be missing from the Aviv computerized system that tracks (among other things) the ports of entry to the country. This, invariably, means that the people either entered Israel under an assumed identity or that they traversed the border from Egypt. It is viewed as the greatest “sin,” because it not only undermines the state's sovereign power to govern the lives of those staying within its precinct (this is true for any undocumented worker or transnational migrant who has overstayed his or her visa), but also because withholding this information from the state is a practice that the state, through its bureaucracy, cannot properly deal with as it undermines its ability to govern in a rational and calculated way.

Responsible subjects follow the law and conduct their lives in a calculated and rational fashion (they vote, pay their taxes, take out their garbage, take care of their health, etc.). They are trackable, traceable, and tractable: State bureaucracies can find them, trace their past location and actions (whether a person paid his or her bills on time, entered the country at a certain date, etc.), and, if necessary, correct their behavior. None of this applies to sojourners who are staying or working in the country without a visa. The Israeli Interior Ministry can locate them only at random, or through using intelligence (mostly informants); often there is no record of their entry to the country or of their presence in it since, and they are seen as inherently incorrigible. They represent the limit of governmentality; those who cannot be governed because they cannot govern themselves. Moreover, those who stay and work in Israel illegally are seen as strangers in the Baumanian sense, people so different that citizens cannot even sympathize with them or attempt to understand the way they experience reality.Footnote ⁴⁰

They are so alien to border control officers because they are the complete converse of the responsible citizen: They don't have papers, they often don't have stable homes or families, they do not pay taxes, and they are usually uninsured—in short, uncivilized. The first and second binary divisions mentioned earlier are, therefore, meant to distinguish between those who can be governed and those who are ungovernable and must therefore be deported.

Governmentality creates a mental gap between the civilized and the feral who cannot be domesticated. Border control officers have many examples regarding illegal sojourners (mostly, but not only, those who migrated from Africa): about how filthy they are and how they litter their surroundings, about their indecent households, and about their criminal mindset. In the rare cases when the Immigration Police apprehends a sojourner who is from a first-world country, the border control officer will almost invariably release that person and permit him or her to leave the country of his or her own accord or rectify his or her status. “There is a huge difference,” explained Avi to me. “This is someone reasonable. He will not run away. It is all a matter of trust. You think I didn't try to release Nigerians? Nine times out of ten, they disappear.”

Conclusion: The Logic of Deportation

Rather than attempt to explain national political processes by viewing the raison d’État, I focused in this paper on the emotional mechanism and processes that enable large-scale social outcomes. I have attempted to enumerate the bureaucratic, cultural, and moral mechanisms that make the deportation of large numbers of sojourners possible. By focusing on the bureaucrats who administer the deportation, as well as on the bureaucratic logic that undergirds their behavior, a better understanding of this macro process can be reached. In this case, the deportation process of sojourners from Israel is an interesting case study that can shed light on other large-scale national projects.

In Israel, the deportation itself is the result of the state's inability to govern sojourners who are non-Jews and non-Arabs and who are painted as incorrigible and intractable. Unlike citizens who can usually be influenced by diverse state apparatuses into becoming self-governing individuals, state bureaucrats tend to see sojourners as a lost cause. In this sense, the interactions between border control officers and sojourners in Israel mark the end of governmentality, and not only its failure. This is because these interactions introduce the desire of state bureaucracies (through the actions of bureaucrats) to deport rather than govern and improve the way sojourners behave in their everyday lives, and turn them into better (at least, from a modern point of view) citizens or denizens.

The willingness of border control officers to inflict suffering and pain on sojourners by deporting them from Israel is dependent on their ability to continually view themselves as moral human beings. This is done by alleviating themselves of some of the responsibility for deportation by breaking the deportation decision-making process into a series of simple dichotomic categories and by adhering to an ultra-national Zionist context. The Zionist context is important because it subjugates other, more particular narratives and justifies depurations.

Another important mechanism that enables border control officers to deport sojourners is the governing of emotions. Governing emotions, however, is not only a technique of the self, an individual act. It is a social and bureaucratic process of educating consent that shapes and normalizes affect and emotions and reproduces the “correct” modes of feeling to affect bureaucratic decisions.