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The uncomfortable truth about luck: reflections on getting access to the Spanish state deportation field

2019; Wiley; Volume: 27; Issue: S1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1469-8676.12626

1469-8676

Barak Kalir,

Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

Methodological accounts often deliberately omit the role that luck plays in getting access to challenging research sites. Indeed, it sounds unprofessional and feels unsatisfying to attribute luck to our work. 'I hope to get lucky' will not go down well with most supervisors or as part of any grant proposal. We should, however, consider that luck literally stands for the probability that certain events might take place under certain circumstances. Reflecting on our luck can therefore help us to expound important features that structure the probability of getting access. In my case, getting access to the Spanish state deportation regime could never be anticipated or secured simply in line with the importance of my project or my academic credentials. Obtaining formal approval from the Spanish authorities proved to be impossible, but I eventually achieved access in a messy way that involved many informal interactions and much uncertainty. Accounting for my months-long attempts, I show how luck sensitised me to officials' ample discretionary power and pervasive sense of impunity in producing an image of 'the state' as unpredictable and opaque. This image induced the strong sensation that my fieldwork crucially depended on the whims of particular officials. Souvent les comptes rendus méthodologiques passent délibérément sous silence le rôle de la chance dans l'obtention de l'accès à des sites de recherche difficiles. En effet, caractériser nos travaux en termes de chance semble peu professionnel et peu satisfaisant. « J'espère avoir de la chance » ne plaira pas à la plupart des directeurs de recherches ou dans le cadre d'une demande de subvention. Toutefois il faudrait envisager que la chance représente littéralement la probabilité que certains événements se produiraient dans certaines circonstances. Réfléchir sur notre chance permet donc de nous aider à exposer d'importantes caractéristiques qui structurent la probabilité d'obtenir un accès. Dans mon cas, l'accès au régime d'expulsion de l'État espagnol n'aurait jamais pu être anticipé ou obtenu simplement en fonction de l'importance de mon projet ou de mon expérience universitaire. Obtenir l'approbation officielle des autorités espagnoles s'est avéré impossible et c'est de manière désordonnée que j'ai finalement réussi à obtenir un accès, à travers de nombreuses interactions informelles et beaucoup d'incertitude. En rendant compte de plusieurs mois de tentatives à cet effet, je montre de quelle manière la chance m'a sensibilisé au pouvoir discrétionnaire et au sentiment d'impunité qui règnent largement parmi les agents officiels et créent une image imprévisible et opaque de « l'État ». Cette image m'a donné la forte impression que mes enquêtes dépendent particulièrement des lubies de certains agents. 'Can I deport you or not?', Mariano defiantly asked me. 'You have a Dutch passport, right? But can I deport you if I want or not, ah? Tell me!' For a second, all the police agents in the office paused and turned their eyes towards me. Knowing Mariano by then for quite some time, I could tell this was one of his extrovert provocations, so I went along with it. 'Of course, you can, you deport EU citizens all the time', I teased him back, 'In fact, I'd be happy if you deport me so that I can see first-hand how you guys are doing it.' Everyone burst into laughter and Mariano,1 a veteran police agent in his early 60s, gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder and triumphantly affirmed: 'You are right. I can deport you as well, if I want!' My fieldwork among police agents at the Brigade of Foreigners and Frontiers in the province of Madrid (Brigada Provincial de Extranjería y Fronteras, hereafter BFF), the unit that executes deportation from Madrid and other parts of Spain, was mostly conducted in a friendly atmosphere.2 After agents came to terms with my presence as a researcher in their midst, they were mostly affable and responsive. 'We have nothing to hide' was a common phrase among those whose daily work I studied. Once I was 'in', there appeared to be very little control over the access I had to police work at the BFF. I was allowed to shadow agents in their daily work, to look over their shoulders straight at computer screens and paper files, and to ask all sorts of questions about the handling of deportation. I sometimes grabbed a drink with them at the canteen or joined them on a lunchbreak in a nearby restaurant. Yet conducting research on the Spanish deportation field was not always a success story – far from it. For months, attempts to get formal approval from the authorities to study state bureaucracies were to little avail. It seemed 'the state' was not too impressed by the letters I sent to different officials, emphasising that my project was sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), that it was part of a comparative study in a number of European and non-European countries, and that any kind of access to the daily work of field units involved in migration/deportation management would be highly appreciated by me, the University of Amsterdam and the ERC. The fact that I adorned my communications, all printed on an official university letterhead, with my titles as professor, principal investigator and head of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, also appeared to fail in producing a favourable response at the receiving end. As I shall describe in detail, I eventually achieved access in a messy manner that crucially involved a series of unforeseen and informal interactions and vital assistance from Spanish colleagues. Reflecting on my experiences – moving from nearly categorical rejection to a sudden and exceptional openness – I cannot help recognising, among the many important aspects of getting access, the crucial role that luck has played in my endeavour of 'studying up'. Essentially, as Nader emphasised, 'because the researcher has less power than the researched, studying up challenges taken for granted understandings of the research relationship, and forces researchers to address the interrelated issues of access, methodology, attitudes, and ethics' (1969: 301). While actual fieldwork among BFF agents was more of an exercise in 'studying sideways' (Ortner 2010) – that is, studying people with whom the researcher shares similar socioeconomic background, race and middle-class upbringing – the effort involved in getting access to the BFF was a sharp lesson in 'studying up'. Social scientists who have studied up have reflected in enlightening manners on methodological and ethical difficulties (Aguiar and Schneider 2016), on challenges to the researcher's identity (Priyadharshini 2003), on handling suspicion (Gusterson 1993) as well as on 'important changes in the nature and potential consequences of anthropological fieldwork' (Forsythe 1999: 6). Especially in police studies, meticulous attention has been paid to conducive and impeding elements in getting access (Fox and Lundman 1974; Van Maanen 2001; Garriott 2013; Karpiak and Garriott 2018), also from a comparative perspective (Beek and Göpfert 2013). In addition, important advances on Nader's initial call to 'study up' have highlighted the complexity involved in studying powerful institutions and state bureaucracies that can be staffed by diverse actors from different economic, ethnic and racial backgrounds (Gusterson 1997). Thus, expansive calls emerged to study 'down, up, sideways, through, backwards, forwards, away and at home' (Hannerz 2006). Yet the role that luck might have played in any successful attempt to get access to challenging research sites is usually unconsciously ignored or deliberately omitted from methodological accounts. Understandably, it sounds terribly unprofessional and feels annoyingly unsatisfying to attribute luck to our successes. It is also difficult to include luck as an ingredient in any research methodology. 'I hope to get lucky' will not go down well with most supervisors or as part of any grant proposal. Talking about luck, so it seems, runs contrary to claims for the scientific merits of ethnographic research. Yet this feeling is arguably rooted in a basic misunderstanding of what luck actually stands for. There are three important things to consider in acknowledging luck as an integral aspect in the process of gaining access. First, the scientific definition of luck has nothing to do with things like 'destiny' or 'faith', but simply with smaller or higher probability that a certain event might take place under certain circumstances. Thus, luck as an analytical category that pertains to 'probability' should not be confused with emic references to supernatural interventions which migrants in desperate situations often make (cf. Drotbohm 2017: 35). In other words, the more we know about the circumstances that determine an event, the less luck is involved in predicting the outcome. If requests by anthropologists to study public institutions were always honoured, there would be no luck involved in such attempts to get access. Of course, since public institutions, like all organisations, are inclined to guard their boundaries and treat their professionalism as a form of 'controlled content' (Noordegraaf 2007), getting access is never a straightforward procedure, but instead one that depends on multiple factors, including: the reviewing authority, the essence and timing of the request, the professional credentials of the requesting parties as well as their nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, seniority, past experiences with studying state institutions, etc. Given that we can hardly be aware, let alone know for certain the impact, of all the circumstances that determine any decision on access, there is evidently an element of indeterminate probability in the outcome we obtain. Second, acknowledging luck takes nothing away from our competency as professional researchers and the need for a robust methodology and much footwork. As will become evident from my experience, to meet my luck in studying the Spanish deportation field, I needed to make unceasing attempts, engage in different methods, deploy various skills, and rely on others to assist me. Thus, while preparation, skills, experience, network and perseverance (emotional not the least, in the face of recurring rejections) are all essential in raising the probability for gaining access, they can usually not fully guarantee it. Working hard and having luck are not mutually exclusive, and successful fieldwork regularly requires both. Here we should also remember that getting access is hardly ever a yes/no binary endeavour, it is rather that the access we eventually get is customarily moulded by negotiations, contingencies and unexpected eventualities (Kalir 2006). Finally, paying attention to luck in attempting access can potentially teach us something important about the properties of the field we study. The (im)probability of certain events to take place in certain fields can be very telling for a broader understanding of how a field is socially configured and structurally wired. In my case, the ways in which the authorities engaged with me as an academic researcher were conditioned by two key features that also decisively shaped police interactions with illegalised migrants.3 First, police agents enjoyed ample and largely unchecked discretionary power in performing their job. Second, a pervasive sense of impunity engulfed their decisions and actions. Clients seemed to have little or no practical means to contest agents' decisions (Vallbé et al. 2019). As a result, the treatment one could end up receiving in the deportation field often seemed arbitrary, unpredictable and crucially dependent on chance. This was precisely what I heard from dozens of illegalised migrants who insisted that dealing with the authorities was something like Russian roulette. Illegalised migrants could hardly know whether and when their deportation might take place. Getting deported depended on multiple factors (many unknown to migrants) including, crucially, on the particular policeperson with whom one interacted. For me, getting access could never be anticipated in line with the importance of my project or existing laws regarding transparency in public institutions. Thus, without equating my academic dealings with state officials to the more existential ones experienced by illegalised migrants, I can nevertheless discern some key features in the modus operandi that patterns interactions of state agents in the deportation field with all 'clients'. Just like for illegalised migrants, the opacity and arbitrariness of 'the state', and the impunity with which officials acted, translated into a strong sense that my fieldwork crucially depended on the whims of particular officials. The article proceeds with an additional theoretical grounding of researchers' need to get lucky in studying up fenced-off state institutions. The subsequent two sections recount my attempts at getting access to the Spanish deportation field. I emphasise how paying attention to the role of luck in our research endeavours can not only broaden our understanding of the organising principles in the field, but also do justice to the 'messy stuff' that gets so often informally discussed among colleagues, who then go on to clean their academic texts of any sign of luck. The state that emerges from many insightful accounts within the burgeoning 'anthropology of the state' is customarily a non-monolithic one, fraught with messy contradictions and competing agendas among its different branches and functionaries (Aretxaga 2003; Kalir and Sur 2012; Bierschenk and de Sardan 2014). It is the Janus face of the state that we habitually encounter as we move between the front and back stage of its bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980). Recognising that state power is regularly wielded through effectively and affectively producing confusion and ambiguity among all those who enter its realm (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017: 3), we must come to terms with the unpredictability that characterises our interactions with state agents. Dissecting the major difficulty of studying the state, Abrams contended that: 'We seem to have evidence that the state itself is the source of the state's ability to defy our efforts to unmask it' (1988: 63). This 'defying ability' of state agents essentially emanates from the possibility to evoke 'the state' in order to furnish legitimacy, and deflect accountability, for preventing access to those who wish to scrutinise their work. Herein, state security institutions like the police are particularly positioned vis-à-vis non-state actors.4 For starters, the police are invested, literally, with the very task of guarding the (b)order of the state. In their formal training and informal socialisation, in their weapons and the symbolism involved in their costumes and insignias, the police are taught (how) to guard the (laws of the) state. Police agents are thus among the most disposed members in society to truly entertain the notion of 'the state' as real. Moreover, maintaining secrecy and collecting intelligence, which are part and parcel of police work, obviate the need to protect police work from outsiders. Finally, as members in an institution that is grounded in discipline, built on hierarchy and charged with a monopoly of violence, police agents are firmly drilled to believe in the importance of (protecting) 'the state'. Ostensibly, one of the internal risks to the facade of 'the state' can come from those, like academics, who wish to scrutinise the actual work of state actors. While such scrutiny can arguably lead to improvements, many police agents maintain the 'fetishistic assertion of expert judgment' (Masco 2013: 263) and the idea that no outsider knows better than them how to do their work. The inclination of many officials is therefore to decline formal requests from external investigators into state practices. Officials have 'better things to do' and can easily evoke 'the state' to explain why they cannot accommodate the request of academics. In this sense, 'the state' has been perfected in providing immunity from potentially risky intrusions. As I shall describe in the next section, while it was never exactly clear how I eventually got access to the Spanish deportation police, it clearly had much to do with informal face-to-face interactions with officials. Such interactions, as I learned from previous experiences in similar studies I conducted in different countries (Kalir 2012, 2017a, 2019), can dramatically increase the chances for, if not instantly facilitate, at least some access to the field, even when formal requests had been previously rejected via other lines of communication. In accounting for this apparent inconsistency, a number of factors stand to reason: first, state officials want to see who they might collaborate with in order to have a 'feel' regarding the potential risk involved in approving research for a particular project; second, in informal face-to-face interactions one can agree on certain conditions for allowing research that are difficult to formulate in a formal written agreement (for example: 'first you talk to x and then we'll see'); finally, in a direct interaction compassion can be elicited for the cause and importance of one's project or some other personal appeal might come into play (not least sexualised interest). All these and possibly other factors surely played a role in my attempts to get access to studying state security institutions. But it is to another factor that I wish to draw attention here; one that relates to the manner in which the spectre of 'the state' might work on state officials in an unexpected way. Bureaucrats, as convincingly shown by Lipsky (1980), regularly use the discretionary power that is invested in their position to satisfy various kinds of interests and ambitions they have in and around their job (cf. Kalir et al. 2012; Blundo et al. 2013). The deportation field is fraught with discretionary power, since many of the practices necessary for securing deportations cannot be articulated in formal laws, as they would clash with all kinds of human-rights conventions and standards (see Ellermann 2005: 1220). It means that in face-to-face interaction with state officials who are in a position to facilitate research, a new and largely unpredictable dynamic kicks in. Endowed with ample discretionary power, certain state officials may feel compelled to show (off) that they cannot be reduced to a cog-like functionary of 'the state'. Failing to exhibit the power to take important decisions can be interpreted by 'significant others' as if, rather than being the masters of 'the state', officials are in fact themselves subjects of it. I use the phrase 'significant others' here to stress that researchers must have certain status, credentials or public exposure, to an extent that calls on officials' sense of importance or trepidation from losing face. As will become clear in this article, my identity as a white, middle-class, male anthropologist from the Netherlands, who can manage well a 'security talk' given my personal experience as an officer in the Israeli army (a fact I selectively made known in face-to-face meetings), disposed me to intrigue state officials in ways that put their own identity and status on the line during our mutual performances of à la Goffman (1959) 'impression management'. In sum, when engaging 'the state', as personified by officials in a position of potential gatekeepers, some might be triggered to demonstrate their discretionary power rather than to hide behind 'the state'. Needless to say, some officials might prefer not to bother with researchers and, instead, to use their impunity to simply evade or reject researchers' requests. Whether officials act in one way or another depends on their seniority, personal character, mood, ethnic/regional/educational background, evaluation of the possible implications of a specific research, etc. It also crucially depends on the specific personal and professional characteristics of the researcher who lodges the request for access, and on how his/her characteristics match up in face-to-face intersubjective exchanges with officials. It is literally impossible for researchers to know, let alone to account for, all the intervening factors that may influence a decision to grant them access (or not). This highly contingent zone of indeterminacy is often, as I argue, what we more colloquially call 'our luck'. Yet there are good reasons to address 'our luck' in a serious way, as I will show in the next section. Being traditionally an emigration country for the best part of the 20th century, Spain has turned since the early 1990s into an attractive European migratory destination. Authorised and unauthorised migrants were drawn to Spain by its booming economy, flourishing informal economic sectors (mostly in construction and agriculture), lenient visa and residency regime (especially for people coming from countries in Latin America and, until 2005, also from Morocco), and relatively easy access, regardless of status, to medical services and education for children (Calavita 2005; Aja and Arango 2006; Moffette 2018). Like many other countries in Europe and beyond, Spain systematically turned a blind eye to the entrance and permanence of unauthorised migrants, especially during periods of high demand for cheap labour (Martínez 2004; De Lucas 2008; Kalir 2010). In the mid-2000s, the number of undocumented migrants residing in Spain was guesstimated at around 1 million (González-Enríquez 2009). Notwithstanding this leniency, since it joined the European Union in 1986, Spain has increasingly aligned with a sweeping move towards approaching migration as a security issue (Moffette 2018: 95–9). In the past two decades, Spain fortified physical borders (notoriously in Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish enclaves in Morocco), restricted visa and residency regimes, and illegalised and dehumanised migrants (Calavita and Suárez-Navaz 2003; Andersson 2014; García 2016). With respect to deportation, since the early 2000s, Spain has consistently been among the top EU states in issuing deportation orders to non-EU citizens and in executing a high proportion of 'enforced returns' (Eurostat 2018). Although the number of deportees fluctuates yearly, since 2000 Spain has executed between 10,000 and 15,000 deportations each year (Ministerio del Interior 2015). Since 2013, the number of deportees has been decreasing to around 7,000–8,000 per year (Ministerio del Interior 2015) as a result of an economic slowdown that reduced the number of newcomers and pushed some long-term migrants to independently leave the country or accept 'voluntarily return' programmes (Kalir 2017b). The Spanish media frequently reports on incidents concerning police mistreatment of illegalised migrants, mostly during street arrests, in detention centres and on deportation flights. In recent years a number of migrants have died inside detention centres, leading to formal investigations by the Spanish court and the Ombudsman, as well as public protests regarding police violence.5 There are organised campaigns in Spain, initiated by different activists and civil-society actors, calling for the closing of all detention centres and abolishing deportation flights.6 The Spanish deportation regime thus constitutes a heated and sensitive political field. Early in my fieldwork, I talked with a few academics working in Spain on and around migration/deportation. I quickly realised a consensus existed on the impossibility of getting access to study the deportation apparatus that was mostly run by the National Police (Policía Nacional). In 2012, Margarita Martínez Escamilla, a law professor at the Complutense University in Madrid, managed to get formal permission to interview deportable female detainees. Yet three months into fieldwork her access was abruptly revoked. When we met, she despondently told me the reason for discontinuing her fieldwork was never provided by the authorities. 'There was a change of personnel at the ministry', she recounted, 'and they just used it to make me request permission anew, meanwhile blocking my access. I wrote [to the General Director of the National Police] a few times to ask for explanations, but they didn't even bother to answer.'7 Asking if she had any tips for me, Margarita discouragingly said I would need some 'good contacts', and on a positive note added that: 'Maybe the fact that you come from Amsterdam would help. Maybe they let in someone who is not from Spain.' Having no 'good contacts' in the Spanish police force or the government, I resorted in the early phase of fieldwork to sending formal letters to different high-ranked state officials in key institutions asking for access to any unit in the deportation field. A few weeks passed without a single response. While waiting, I decided to start where I believed it would be easier to enter the field. I contacted civil society actors and activists who were mostly involved in campaigns against detention/deportation in Barcelona and Madrid. It proved to be relatively easy to get in touch with those who positioned themselves as working parallel to or against the state. Herein, my identity as a white, male anthropologist from Amsterdam, who writes critically on migration/deportation policies, clearly helped to facilitate access. As I quickly learned, some of my interlocutors, who often had an academic background in the social sciences, searched for me online and found some of my writings on deportation. They responded very positively and were happy to collaborate with my study. And though sceptical, they hoped I would get access to state institutions for doing some critical research. I sent polite reminders to state officials by electronic mail, thinking my letters might have not arrived at the desired destination. Again, most of my requests went unanswered and those who replied simply dismissed politely the possibility of allowing any fieldwork among their unit. I managed to have two formal interviews with officials in key positions, and while the interviews were interesting, my main goal in conducting them was the opportunity to persuade these officials to allow me some fieldwork in their respective units. Both officials turned down my request, with the common reason being a lack of time in an overworked bureaucracy, as well as security issues in exposing me to operations. They recommended asking permission from those higher up in the state bureaucracy. I explained to them that I had done so already and tried to contest the grounds for rejecting my requests, but to no avail. In the weeks thereafter, the communication channel was silenced. Unlike in a Kafkaesque story, the state I was approaching loomed at a distance as a castle with no doors to knock on. I shared my growing worries regarding access to state authorities with some academic colleagues in Spain. Everyone reaffirmed that chances were 'practically zero' that officials would answer my requests positively. One of the Spanish colleagues, now working at a law department, had previously been working for a few years at the Ministry of Interior under the former government. Luckily for me, this colleague knew one of the high-ranked officials whom I had interviewed (a police officer in charge of a key unit in the detention/deportation field) and was willing to put in a good word for me with him. The police officer then agreed to meet me once more. This was a clear example of the pertinent importance of being enchufado within the Spanish context, which literally means plugged into the system. Without falling into gross generalisation, and just as in many other states worldwide, widespread and longstanding dynamics of clientelism and patronage exist with the state bureaucracy in post-Franco Spain (Hughes 2011). My enchufado colleague managed with one phone call to arrange for me the kind of access I could not achieve for months. My second meeting with the police officer was conducted in a more informal atmosphere and went extremely well. His initial suspicion seemed to fade away, and at the mentioning of my background as an Israeli officer, he openly praised me: 'Someone like you understand what I'm talking about, right?' The officer seemed to be very open and did not hide his own criticism about some of the ways in which the state was dealing with illegalised migrants. Our conversation was pleasant and cordial, and it lasted much longer than planned, with the officer making extra time in his schedule to stay and talk to me. Feeling upbeat, I asked him again his permission to conduct some fieldwork with the unit he was in charge of. The officer said he would not mind me doing some research there, but an approval should be given to me by the National Police headquarters in Madrid. Unlike before, this time the officer offered me the personal email address of the commander of the Central Unit of Expulsions and Repatriations (Unidad Central de Expulsiones y Repatriaciones, hereafter UCER) and promised to put in a good word for me with his old-time colleague. I followed his instructions and this time, majestically, I not only received a response within two days but it was a formal invitation to meet with the commander, a brigadier and one of the top state officials in the deportation field. Once more it became sorely evident that informal contacts were extremely important in a context that was allegedly transparently regulated but traditionally wired by an 'old boys' network. At the meeting on the fifth floor of the National Police headquarters, the brigadier made no secret of meeting me out of respect for his good friend's request. He spoke with a deep voice, and provided a bird's-eye view on how the authorities dealt with issues such as border controls and the identification, detention and depor