How bureaucracies shape access to rights: the implementation of family reunification in Belgium

Abstract

ABSTRACT Throughout the European Union, national governments are amending family reunification laws in order to restrict migration flows. Migration scholars point out that the judiciary is one of the factors hindering migration policy reforms from having the restrictive outcomes intended by national governments. This literature, however, tends to neglect what happens after legislative texts are written down and overlooks the continuation of the policy-making process during the implementation phase. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy literature, I address this gap by focusing on the impact of court decisions on street-level actors implementing family reunification in Belgium. Relying on ethnographic methods, I have conducted extensive fieldwork in the Immigration Office, the Belgian public agency which processes the applications for family reunification. The empirical material reveals that migration officers’ response to court rulings is based on collective representations of case law rather than on court rulings per se. Such findings shed light on the role of the administration and in particular, the collective production of meanings by the administration.