Law Enforcement Agents in European Borders. From relational implementation to international interdependence in migration management.

Law enforcement officers working on the front line at border locations are key actors in the implementation of migration policy. PERCEPTIONs project has developed qualitative research with border guards in Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain by interviewing 20 police officers, and has complemented the information with a study visit and participant observation at Melilla border. All this fieldwork has shown the LEAS' perceptions of migrants/asylum seekers and their reasons for migrating to Europe, as well as their knowledge of the problems and threats suffered by migrants during their migratory journeys. While this was the central objective of the research, the qualitative information has also provided fundamental insights into the role of LEAS in these contexts and the interdependence of their decisions (allowing crossing, applying for asylum...) and the power relations, struggles and negotiations between the different venues of migration policy-making and negotiations with other border authorities (Moroccan in the case of Melilla), which allow us to analyze the existing implementation dynamics. In the case of Spain, border police officers sometimes need to incorporate legal rules/administrative instructions that oblige them to admit asylum applications from self-confessed criminals instead of arresting them or need to react to other actors (Moroccan police) that lead organized gangs of migrants to cross the fences. In this sense, relational sociological approaches (Crossley, 2010) can be considered as suitable theoretical approaches to explain their behavior and decisions in a multi-actor context, while the negotiation and influence of different countries and international authorities can also recommend linking relational approaches to the literature on "multilateral migration governance" (Betts 2011; Hollifield 2022), and, in particular, Hollifield's idea of migration interdependence (Hollifield 2012; 2022), in line with Geiger and Pécoud (2011), which ensures that it is not possible to implement migration policies, even if they are national, in isolation by different countries due to the global context and the interdependencies created.