Abstract
George Weissinger is a former criminal investigator for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and now teaches criminal justice at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. His book, Law Enforcement and the INS: A Participant Observation Study of Control Agents (Third Edition), is based, in large part, on the years he spent working with the INS. The title of his book is somewhat misleading as the book is not a “participant observation” study, at least not by any conventional definition of the term. In fact, Weissinger’s book defies simple description. It consists of a hodgepodge collection of quantitative and qualitative information pertinent to an array of issues such as immigration trends in the United States, efforts to manage immigration to the United States, the dissolution of the INS and formation of new immigration control agencies (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), law enforcement organization and management, and discontent among officials who investigate violations of federal immigration law.
In the first few chapters, Weissinger describes the challenges associated with immigration control and formulates a rudimentary sociological perspective on the matter, drawing on classic symbolic interactionists such as Howard Becker, Erving Goffman, and Edwin Lemert. According to Weissinger, his “book attempts to describe the normative structure surrounding the immigration problem, and the processes that create it” (p. 3). He addresses immigration law, the politics surrounding immigration control, and some basic organizational issues such as discretion, role strain, and morale. After he outlines his theoretical preferences, Weissinger briefly describes his methodology and then delves into the plight of investigative agents tasked with the enforcement of immigration law.
Contrary to the most fundamental goal of a participant observation study—namely, unbiased description and analysis of a culture, group, organization, neighborhood, and so on—it is pretty clear Weissinger believes that federal immigration agencies have become little more than ineffective and disorganized bureaucracies, which have no substantive goal other than the production of dubious statistics on deportations. The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters contain a litany of complaints based on Weissinger’s own experiences, interviews with immigration enforcement officials, and his analyses of some of the facts and figures on immigration. According to Weissinger, immigration investigators are at the bottom of the totem pole among federal law enforcement agents, being denied the authority, autonomy, and respect afforded to agents with other federal agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation. To provide a few specifics, Weissinger suggests that immigration investigators are not assigned their own vehicles, discouraged from making arrests, denied adequate equipment, assigned demeaning tasks (e.g., driving detail), unfairly evaluated, rarely promoted, and hung out to dry by their superiors whenever allegations of wrongdoing arise.
Weissinger further argues that, even within the immigration control agencies, there are organizational norms and values that devalue investigators and value patrol agents. Specifically, he claims that there is a “good old boy” network within immigration control agencies, wherein Border Patrol officials or those who have prior experience with the Border Patrol are promoted faster and more frequently than investigators without such experience. Weissinger also asserts that immigration control agencies are stifled by political forces. He suggests that, owing to social and political trends, illegal immigrants are being redefined as victims of misfortune rather than the criminals who they are. To quote Weissinger directly, “labels such as economic refugee, and undocumented worker are carefully peppered in the illegal alien debate to characterize the deviant as something different than what they are” (p. 150).
Following Weissinger, immigration enforcement investigators are belittled and demoralized, as they risk life and limb in an effort to protect the nation from dangerous criminals while receiving neither the support nor the gratitude of those being protected. Politicians and the media depict the investigators, as the Gestapo and the upper echelons of immigration control agencies make no effort to dispel such depictions. In the last couple of chapters, Weissinger wraps up his critique, briefly returning to the sociological approach he sketched in the first few chapters via a discussion of notions such as deviance, the societal creation of deviance, and the exercise of power. The gist of his diatribe seems to be that the government of the United States has, at least since the Carter Administration, lacked a consistent and coherent policy of immigration control and the political chaos which has enveloped the debate over immigration has resulted in a decrease in effective enforcement of immigration law and a concomitant demoralization of immigration control officials.
There is clearly some validity to Weissinger’s thesis that the lack of stable immigration policies and the dual function of immigration control agencies (i.e., assist immigrants legally entitled to reside in the nation while simultaneously deterring and deporting those without legal residency) create challenges for immigration control officials. It is unclear, however, that the challenges faced by immigration control officials are any greater than the challenges faced by other federal law enforcement agencies, which have arduous goals such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (control weapons trafficking), the Drug Enforcement Administration (control drug trafficking), or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (prevent terrorist attacks, control cyber threats, and counterespionage). The dual function of immigration control agencies is uncommon among federal law enforcement agencies but is by no means unique within the field of law enforcement. Many notable scholars such as Egon Bittner, Peter Manning, and Frank Remington have commented on the ambiguities and inherent contradictions of the police role in a democratic society. There can be little doubt that the myriad roles and tasks with which the average police officer must contend are at least as complex and fraught with incongruity as are the duties of immigration control officials.
Weissinger’s motley collection of statistics, vignettes, and opinions may be of some interest to researchers who study immigration and/or criminal justice organizations, but as a whole, his analyses are lacking in depth, rigor, and originality. Much of the book consists of little more than the grumbling about inadequate resources, copious red tape, and inept bosses, which is ubiquitous in any bureaucracy.