Black Man Walking, Brown Man Working: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Perceptions of Immigrant Worthiness

Abstract

Street-level bureaucrats have a degree of discretion in carrying out their work and the extent to which street-level bureaucrats view the citizen-client as ‘worthy’ affects how they choose to exercise their discretion. Scholars have assessed how the individuals’ actions, characteristics and situational context affect street-level bureaucrats’ perceptions of worthiness. Little work has focused on understanding how they perceive the worthiness of immigrants who may speak, act and dress very differently than the majority of citizen-clients. This article explores street-level bureaucrats’ perceptions of immigrants in 23 U.S. cities and tests the hypothesis that workers in welcoming organizations will perceive immigrants as worthy and those in unwelcoming organizations will perceive immigrants as unworthy. I summarize results of 41 interviews with frontline workers in police departments and public libraries to illustrate their perceptions of immigrant-clients. I find little evidence that street-level bureaucrats’ perceptions of immigrants are related to the agency’s degree of welcomeness.