Administrative Burdens and Deception Attempts: a participant observation study at a Schengen visa consulate in West Africa

The so-called migrant-receiving countries of the Global North have been known to employ migration policies that aim to discourage and curve incoming migration. Examples include the intensification of the administrative burden for legal migration pathways (Moynihan et al. 2022) and the externalisation of border control (Stock et. al. 2019). Such strategies have been widely criticised by migration scholars, who highlight the power imbalance between state mechanisms and migrants (Faist, 2018) and point out the paradoxical reality where restrictive migration regimes push for further irregular migration (Ngom, 2022). When it comes to the implementation of migration policies, the role of street-level bureaucrats who interact directly with potential migrants and make individual decisions on the applicants’ ‘deservingness’ has received renewed interest in recent years (Infantino, 2019). This paper contributes to this literature through a participant observation study at a newly established Embassy and Consulate of an EU member state in West Africa. From the position of an administrative employee, the author was able to observe closely the visa application process in practice, while also playing an active role in the status determination of hundreds of Schengen visa applications over the course of six months in 2022. Specific tasks under this role included interviewing visa applicants, examining their files and documents, and making decisions on their applications. While this research largely corroborates the findings of existing studies with regards to the particularly high administrative burdens that visa applicants face, it also paints a more complex and nuanced picture. It shows that consulate employees encounter deception attempts from the part of applicants on a regular basis and through a variety of means and approaches, some more sophisticated than others. In response, state employees often feel they need to take on the role of an ‘investigator’, extensively scrutinising the authenticity of the submitted documents and the merit of the applicants’ claims. New visa applications are subsequently treated with a degree of suspicion, and the street-level bureaucrats’ discretionary decisions are less likely to be beneficial for visa applicants. This paper contributes to the field of migration policy implementation, offering an insider’s perspective. References Faist, T. (2018). The Transnationalized social question. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Infantino, F. (2021) How does policy change at the street level? Local knowledge, a community of practice and EU visa policy implementation in Morocco, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47:5, 1028-1046, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1662717 Moynihan, D., Gerzina, J., Herd, P. (2022). Kafka’s Bureaucracy: Immigration Administrative Burdens in the Trump Era, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 5(1)22–35, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppmgov/gvab025 Ngom, A. (2022) A Family Mobilization for Migration to Europe from Casamance, Senegal. Borders in Globalization Review Volume 4, Issue 1 (Fall & Winter 2022): 67–77 https://doi.org/10.18357/bigr41202220828 Stock, I., Üstübici, A. & Schultz, S.U. Externalization at work: responses to migration policies from the Global South. CMS 7, 48 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0157-z