| Summary/Abstract |
Coverage of ‘Borderland Schengen’ and the European immigration ‘crisis’ continues to produce ‘irregular’ migrants through visual-political processes not only as threats to stability and cohesion in Europe, but as threats to the notion of state sovereignty (Kühnemund 2018). This rhetoric of crisis relies on older models of human smuggling networks in which these networks are characterized as hierarchical ‘businesses’ that threaten to subvert states’ monopolies over human movement through coordinated, organized actions (Baird 2016). Governments and smuggling networks are, however, made up of individuals whose actions constitute the ‘everyday practices’ (Ashutosh and Mountz 2012) and the ‘street level’ policy-making (Lipsky 2010) of the organizations they comprise. The positioning of these individuals within their organizational terrain, or what Pierre Bourdieu defines as the ‘bureaucratic field’ (Bourdieu, Wacquant, and Farage 1994), influences how these everyday practices are carried out. Because of the lack of a homogenous body of practice within these organizations, the ways in which the agents of both networks interact with each other at and across Europe’s borders may differ considerably from their representation in news media and public discourse.
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