ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which the categories of 'smugglers' and 'rings', first employed by police agents, have gradually come to dominate the representations and objectives of immigration policy over the past 20 years. It explores the way in which a particular police force, the Border Police department, has gradually helped to (re)define the targets of border controls. The chapter also examines the relationships between categories used by street-level bureaucrats and reform of migratory policy in France and Europe. It describes migratory policies through two lenses: first, through the analysis of professional transformations in the police department since it took over border checks in 1953; second, through an aspect of the department's activity, the processing of information collected by the agents during border checks. Because of the lifting of internal borders within the Schengen Area, the Police aux filières (PAF) adopted a new method, flow analysis, for measuring its clientele, ultimately aimed at filières or smuggling rings.
