ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines contemporary enunciations of the long-uttered narrative of powerlessness in border control. The first section demonstrates how trends discussed in preceding chapters, such as the technological deskilling of officers and the waning importance given to their know-how in border decisions, have disrupted officers’ identities. The second section explores officer’s responses to these conditions and identifies three strategies through which they contest their marginalization. These include the use of a pseudoscientific language regarding risk indicators; a return to an idiosyncratic form of discretion for treating complex cases; and the interpretation of discretion as a social wage. The chapter concludes by arguing that this feeling of disorientation underpins officers’ recent conviction that they now make up a reactive “police of the border.”
