ABSTRACT
When newly enforcement-trained officers integrate into ports of entry, how do they get along with experienced officers who are accustomed to less forceful attitudes and behaviour? In the context of rapid transformations in bordering, the dispositions of older officers and newer officers do not mix well. This chapter reveals generational tensions that shed light on how border practices are contested and defended, by using a temporal line of argument whereby their effectiveness is evaluated in association with an imagined bordering past, present and future. Frictions between officers over the shift to a more peremptory, oppressive and regimented take on bordering betray the dynamics of ageing in border control. These frictions concern nostalgia for the “good old times” of economic protectionism and disagreements about the relative worth of questioning and ever-changing technologies as investigative methods. They are further institutionalized by promotional dynamics that favour younger, more-educated officers over the more-experienced officers, who, as a result, become increasingly marginalized and seen as being out of touch with “the future of border control.” The chapter concludes by examining how the firearm, often invoked as the chief symbol of a generational shift to enforcement, reworks the officer’s body. By fostering a more distanced conduct and suspicious attitude, firearm training makes possible the advent of a policing sensibility in those who are armed, ultimately altering the relationship between the travelling public and those who, in the strict sense, have become border guards.
