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Based on interviews with bureaucrats and judges in several Swiss cantons, this article analyzes how bureaucrats decide to order immigration detention and how the judicial review shapes their decisions. The authors argue that discretionary decision-making regarding immigration detention is structured by the web of relationships in which decision-makers are embedded and affected by the practices of other street-level actors. The varying cantonal configurations result in heterogenous bureaucratic practices that affect the profiles and numbers of persons being detained. In particular, differences in judges' interpretation of legal principles, as well as in their expectations, strongly affect bureaucratic decisions.

L'article est basé sur une recherche portant sur les détenu·e·s étrangers et étrangères dans deux prisons de haute sécurité en Suisse (l'une pour femmes et l'autre pour hommes). Il aborde la prison en tant qu'institution genrée et explore la manière dont elle gère l'hétérogénéité croissante de la population carcérale résultant des migrations et de la délinquance globales. La prison pour hommes applique une politique consistant à ignorer le genre, mais sa logique sous-jacente est masculine. Elle ne reconnaît que de manière limitée les différences ethniques et culturelles. La logique institutionnelle de la prison pour femmes est sensible au genre et permet une plus grande prise en compte de l'hétérogénéité dans la pratique quotidienne des employé·e·s et des détenues.

AbstractFocusing on the intersections between bureaucracies of welfare and migration control, this article interrogates how decisions about the future stay of non‐citizens receiving social assistance are made in a relational interplay of different offices and actors in Switzerland. We investigate how relational decision‐making is fundamental in crafting legitimate decisions about the exclusion of "poor others." Based on ethnographic fieldwork with diverse actors involved in migration control enforcement and welfare policy implementation, this article contributes to understanding how legal regulations turn into social reality. We show that a multitude of actors, including social services, inform and affect migration control‐related decisions. This relationality co‐produces the outcome and legitimacy of the final decision taken by the respective migration office. In turn, the actors' fields of action, values, and procedures are themselves affected by this relational involvement. The relational character of decision‐making therefore involves an expansion of migration control into other bureaucratic and social fields that co‐construct legitimate decisions concerning the deportation of "poor others" and create the illusion of a "coherent state," invisibilizing structural inequalities.

Abstract
This analysis of Swiss Federal Supreme Court judgements shows the coupling of welfare and migration control. Foreign nationals depending on social assistance might face the withdrawal of their residence permits. We show how the conveyed legal logics create conditionality of rights and a differentiation of (non-)citizens. The judgements individualise social assistance dependence and follow a neoliberal logic of economic participation. They establish rationalities which reinforce politics of belonging and welfare chauvinism.

Categorising certain forms of human movement as 'migration' and others as 'mobility' has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration–mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility: continuum (fluid mobilities transform into more stable forms of migration and vice versa), enablement (migration requires mobility, and mobility can trigger migration), hierarchy (migration and mobility are political categories that legitimise hierarchies of movement) and opposition (migration and mobility are pitted against each other). These interplays reveal the normative underpinnings of different categories, which we argue are too often implicit and unacknowledged.