Genre, belonging and institutional inclusion of refugees and immigrants in Brazil: Gouvènman Brezilyen an Swete.

Mobility and the dispute for legal recognition is a contradictory binary space in which the sociology of actors is constructed discursively between 'us' and 'them', that is, through the labelling of social actors, the generalization of negative attributes and the institutional argument to exclude or include specific groups. Given historical norms, discursive constructions may intensify or mitigate, make less or more implicit tolerance as well as norms to be politically correct in the public sphere (Wodak, 2008). Immigration discourse fits into an institutional habitus as well as the immigrant's lifeworld. It presupposes power relations and networks, naturalized and constructed in immigration discourse. This discourse and power refer to hierarchies in contexts in which multiple truths are constructed vis à vis immigration. These truths are arguments that empower State hegemony in which the immigrant is constructed either as a menace to national security or as a threat to the Brazilian labour market; or as highly skilled workers, inserted on the Brazilian market. At the same time, revindications from human rights groups as well as legal norms on human rights generate other public discourses within institutional discourse. It is essential therefore to understand how discipline and control are constructed in relation to a Historical Discourse Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) as well as in terms of the contextual legitimation of Brazil's 2017 New Migration Law. Thus, the focus of this project is data from notifications and legal rulings, published on the Brazilian Federal Police website on expulsions, requests for economic insufficiency, visa cancellations or deferrals and fines for overstays and other infringements with a view to understanding the relation between control, discipline, agency and the immigrant's institutional trajectory given that mobility does not imply a mere dislocation from one place to another; human flows provoke the problematization of mobility due to securitization and criminalization. The policing of human flow is symbolic, in other words, security is public patrimony, a value or a right, a demand of citizens (Amicelle et al., 2017: 167; 169). Criminology in mobility cannot be ignored, borders are not always seen as humanitarian landscapes but as spaces of conflict. They are spaces in which sovereignty apparently becomes fragmented in the shop window of social and humanitarian inclusion; protection of citizens; crime and the stigma of criminalization. Understanding the link between crimmigration and criminalization in migration contexts and the dispute for borders and citizenship in the determining of members reveals the conflict and empathy in public sphere discourses, the boundaries of policy and legislation and the counternarratives of documented and undocumented migrants (De Fina, 2003; van Dijk, 2006). According to Stumpf, membership theory has to do with two strategies employed by the sovereign state: the power to punish and the power to express moral condemnation (2006: 15). Immigration is built along moral filters. Based upon a legitimising and argumentative framework (van Leeuwen, 2007; Ellis, 2017), it is possible to recognise the foreigner in judicial and or social terms. Objectively, the "State" is defined legally, it is considered as a sovereign state power both internally as well as externally, as a space, it is a clearly demarcated area – State territory. In addition to this legal definition, the "nation" also means a politically demarcated community with a common ascendency, tied at least to a common language, culture and history… a national origin, attributed by others, associated from the beginning as a negative demarcation between what is native and foreign (Habermas, 2002: 129-130; 132). In this sense, state immigration discourse is bureaucratic and at the same time strategic: the bureaucracy of laws and legal procedures together with State talk serve to construct a favourable image - a scenario of imagined stability, legitimised in legal-institutional language that cocoons against the disturbing scenarios of human dislocation – 'ethnoscapes' in movement (Appadurai, 1996).

The steoreotypes of State bureaucracy do not exist in a social vacuum (Herzfeld, 1992: 77); they emerge out of relations between social actors in contexts of power, relative to circumstances and situations, national and neoliberal ideologies, systems of classification or meaning and securitization (Arcarazo & Freier, 2015; Barrero & van Dijk, 2007). The notion of 'securitization' has to do not only with economic and territorial issues but refers to the nation-State's ontological security, the construction of immigrants in a negative and excluding manner cultivates the State's ontological security and its immutable sovereignty. In Germany, William (2014) discusses national narrative and citizenship. Among other studies, Santana's extensive work on metaphors used to describe latinos in U.S. public policy stands out (1992; 2002). Another study on the use of metaphor in immigration is by Strauss (2013). Carminero-Santangelo (2016) provides an in-depth overview of border literature, a history of immigration policies in the United States and immigrants' stories in relation to trauma and genres used in documenting latino border lives. This work is quite significant when considering the emotional gap or hierarchy embedded in public stance and lifeworlds. In Ibrahim (2005), changes in Canadian immigration policy are mapped according to "securitization in migration", hinged along a new type of racist discourse. Ceyhan and Tsoukala (2002) look at discourses underlying securitzation of migration in western societies; they consider that these discourses are based on the myth: immigrants are always a threat to national security, thus the securitization argument justifies the latter's exclusion. Stumpf (2006) carries out a detailed ethnographic study on detention centers for foreigners in the United Kingdom as he explores the complexities of detention in immigrant lifeworlds. For Chilton (2004), securitization is a coercive, legitimising lexicalization in that it generates fear, stemming from the presupposition that immigrants are a physical or economic threat to the host nation. Today, detention centres in the United States, France, the United Kingdom and even in Australia are more common even when there are growing demands for humanitarian treatment, asylum seekers are still treated as criminals. Here in Brazil the recent rise in asylum requests from Haitian and Venezuelan nationals as well as from other refuge seeking groups has been sketched through ACNUR mediascapes and by the media as a whole and there has been concern regarding the insertion (interiorização) of these groups and human rights issues. Further, there have been changes in Brazilian immigration vis à vis access to information, debureaucratization, simplification of institutional language, the elaboration of brochures and hypertexts and the organization of social participation forum and projects to foment migrant insertion on the labour market.

The focus of this study is to look at border control interactions in the Brazilian context. The expectation is to generate qualitative and quantitative data with respect to humanitarian judgements and the applicability of the 2017 New Migration Law given the possibility to request a economic sufficiency. In regional terms, the study seeks to describe the role and profile of Brazilian Migration Control regarding securitization, criminalization and migrant inclusion. The Brazilian scenario is a peculiar one in terms of detention facilities as immigration procedures are seen as an administrative practice. Nevertheless, Brazil has one prison in Itaí, São Paulo only for foreigners, involved mainly in drug trafficking and the data available is organized according to type of crime and nationality[1]. There is some information regarding these foreigners and their life in prison[2].

There have also been more statistical publications from the Federal Police as well from the Observatório de Migrações at the University of Brasília in mapping refugee and immigrant mobility flows as a whole throughout the country. Operação Acolhida, produced by the Federal Police is a detailed statistical portrait of state work in tracing immigrant and refugee profiles as well as refugee insertion on the labour market[3]. Operação Acolhida is therefore a mobility map of immigrant movement in Brazil.

The notifications presented below provide information as to immigrants' legal condition as well as reflect institutional agency in the dispute for the country's borders and its limits to mobility in that it checkmates media images of uncurbed migrant flows, appealing from a humanitarian perspective. Nevertheless, the notifications can be considered in terms of the following legitimation categories: 1) 'authorization' is a form of legitimation based upon traditions, customs, laws and persons in positions of authority; 2) "moral assessment", that is, legitimation through discourses of value; 3) rationalization in accordance with targets, the uses of institutional social actions and social knowledge based upon cognitive validity; 4) mythopesis refers to legitimation transmitted in narratives that legitimate actions and punish non-legitimate actions (van Leeuwen, 2007: 91).

An example is the tweet below that serves as example as to how legitimation is constructed in the Brazilian Federal Police: The Brazilian Federal Police provides support to Haitian family in a critical situation

It is essential to remember that the public-institutional sphere is based upon power and hierarchies that are expressed not only in grammatical forms but also have to do with control and dominance of the social occasion, the text genre, regulation of access and specific public spheres and the actors involved (van Dijk, in: Gee & Handford, 2012; Reisigl & Wodak, 2016). The text genres and the social occasion are controlled and written by the institutional hegemony, that is by the Brazilian state's persuasive institutional voice in which truths are determined. Truth is obviously linked to power, to the prestige of certain types of knowledge and texts and to specific social networks. It exists in ideological nodules or acts¹²³. What do they hide? What do they reveal? What do they legitimise? What do they value?

Hence, the following questions must be taken into account in analysing border control notifications or other text genres produced within the scope of immigration:

i) How is immigration constructed in the public sphere (in the Brazilian Federal Police)? (Koller &Wodak, 2008).

ii) How can control be 'argued' without discriminating and or excluding? (Argaman, 2009). 

iii) How are text genres organized in regulating interactions in institutional contexts? (Oberhuber, 2008). 

iv) How is a specific discourse interpreted or transmitted in diverse social groups? (Oberhuber, 2008).

In light of the above questions, the following steps were taken in data collection:

1) the creation of a corpus based upon 3000 notifications (orders, legal rulings, expulsions, decisions), published on the Brazilian Federal Police website between 2017 and 2019; 

2) compilation of other relevant documents; 

3) conducting of interviews with migration control agents in states with more significant migrant flows to Brazil with a view to understanding institutional trajectories for both state agents as well as foreigners.

Given the above, the language of Brazilian immigration policy is built around a globalized terminology; it revolves around the contradictory persuasive discourse of control, selection, insertion and human rights. The institutional habitus or cocoon is always strategically and discursively involved in historical and contemporary contexts and in the construction of public image and normative knowledge through the agency of high level Brazilian state officials (Radhay, 2018). This habitus is a hybrid space in which the public and private interact; it is a space of symbolic codes, values and representations, which may be in conflict. In other words, language lies at the core of the public sphere, as it determines those who remain 'inside' or 'outside' of legal and even social inclusion (Habermas, 2002; Kymlicka, 1995).

According to Bartlett (2014), discourse revolves around cultural capital and market codes. Further, these factors are linked to the interlocutor's credibility, his\her dominance of the language appropriate to a specific situation and his\her competence to be understood and valued by the audience. Hence the importance of institutional ethnography that is a combination of document collection, observation and interviews (Blommaert, 2013). The efficacy of the dialogue between the 'institutional' and community life for immigrants and refugees must be assessed, since identities are positioned or categorized. Sarangi and Slembrouck explain that a professional client is different from a 'warring' client, demanding that the bureaucrat goes out and fights for moral and social principles, prepared to sacrifice the results of procedure. Moral victory is more important than personal gain, given that the bureaucrat is probably not going to lose face. It is the client who must demand social reform, although the client is ready to face the figure of the bureaucrat, he\she is concerned with his own face (1996: 119). Interactions are constructed around a work environment as well as along personal (lifeworlds) as public contexts (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000). These interactions are marked by fragmentation, diversity, the ambivalence between the public and the private, the articulation of diverse semiotic systems and orders of discourse. Literacy competence is always in flux – a complex articulation between the changes of new capitalism, flexibility, velocity, innovation, problem solving, collaboration and lifeworlds; there is the demand for access; a need for economic and social insertion[4].

Some declarations have already been written in Portuguese so as to facilitate foreigners, it is just a matter of filling in personal information and signing. The example below is a declaration of financial constraints.

Example 1 Declaration of financial constraints

The 2017 New Migration Law and notifications 

The institutional immigration scenario is geared towards 'optimization'; there are 'parameters' and 'conventions' between participants (Arminen, 2000: 442; Etcheverry, 2016: 127). In   looking at notifications sent out to immigrants, the following steps were adopted: 

Step 1

This phase involves the download of notifications from the Federal Police website

Step 2

The notifications will be organised according to the following criteria:

1) type of document;
2) migratory situation;
3) nationality and Brazilian state of residence;
4) identification of key terminology
 5) types of notifications per state 

This second phase should result in the publication of a statistical report;

 

Step 3 

A qualitative analysis of notifications. To follow is a brief analysis of some notifications in light of the 2017 New Migration Law. 

Notifications are institutional landscapes that determine immigrants' trajectories (Bloomaert, 2013; Khan, 2017). The number of notifications to foreigners in Brazil between 2017 and 2019 with the New 2017 Migration Law was a little over 3000. This number is not too significant in comparison with major immigration flows in Europe and in the United States and the rise of detention centres, nevertheless, they are worth focusing upon in considering Brazilian immigration policy in terms of securitization and criminalization. 

The table below provides a breakdown of types of notifications up to April 2019. Since then, the number of notifications has increased and there has been a marked rise in the number of expulsions and fines for 'overstays' in the country, but there are no detention centres for foreigners in an irregular situation in the country. There are only administrative records. 

GUIA, Maria João. Crimigração, securitização e o Direito Penal do crimigrante. In :Revista Liberdades. N. 11 - September/December, 2012. P. 90-120. São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 2012, p. 109

Table 1 Notifications published by the Brazilian Federal Police for Migration Control 

Notifications issued to immigrants by the Brazilian Federal Police between 2017 to 2019.

Elaborated from data on the www.dpf.gov.br.

Since April 2019 to May 2020, there have been approximately 115 expulsions; 107 administrative fines; and 1962 infringements. These notifications are the result of the State's interaction with immigrants at the judicial level. They determine to a certain extent their dislocation or immobility. Further, they serve to demarcate through dates and times as well as through carefully related legal accounts the relation between humanitarian borders, knowledge, securitization and entry and exit control. In short, a humanitarian vision of human mobility is linked to knowledge regimes (Walters, 2010: 158). Human mobility is not exempt from evaluative procedures in which there is cautious focus on the legitimation of values and truths. 

There are diverse academic and institutional discussions on the contradiction between a humanitarian view of immigration and agency and control of borders. There is much statistical data generated by the State in partnership with university groups on immigrant and refugee flows, in which it is possible to note a certain transparency in mapping immigrant mobility and insertion throughout the country. Even so, there are no specific studies regarding interactions between Federal Police agents and immigrants in Brazil. Although the notifications are in many instances succinct legal orders, they are actually an important form of discovering a little on how immigration control works in Brazil as access to files and even interviews with immigrants, more specifically refugee applicants are very difficult to come by as occurred in previous research regarding community interpreters and their contact with refugees in UNHCR interviews. Further, there are not too many newspaper reports or documentaries on immigrant and refugee flows on the Brazilian media besides current mediascapes on human refugee flows or historical immigration to Brazil. The notifications, written in Portuguese by federal agents provide much more insight as to how immigration works vis à vis the 2017 Migration Law. They pressupose prior contact with the immigrant (interviews, visits to their domicile) or knowledge of the immigrant's legal status based upon other documents. They are clearly documented evidence of the institutional parameters and conventions involved in determining how immigrants are positioned and can be examined within an argumentative framework (Ellis, 2017:20), based upon van Leeuwen's work (2007). They reveal in a sense the institutionally guided ethnography conducted by federal agents in assessing the migrant's trajectory, that is, mobility and the migrant's legal status in terms of moral and ethical recognition. There is an argumentative framework in which engagement in terms of crime, humanitarian ethics and legality is measured. Argument is based upon modalities, humanitarian stance as well as border protection are weighed value decisions, there is always deliberation as to what should or should not be done in service to the state, national security but also in service to humanitarian issues without going beyond good sense: public sphere theory in action. 

A narrative as an institutional argument in a legal ruling

In the 2017 New Migration Law, there is article 312 in the Law 9.199/2017 regarding economic insufficiency so as to request exemption from or a reduction in the fine for irregular stay in the country. The fine per day for 'overstay' is $100 reais (approximately US$18). 

There are immigrants and or refugees who cannot afford to pay the fine, especially when they have remained illegally for a long period and the value of the fine has accumulated to R$10000 (approximately US$1700). Nevertheless, there must be proof as to their financial status and adequate justification for exemption from or reduction of this fine. Each case is a specific situation that must be assessed by the federal agent. As will be seen, the legal rulings are embedded with moral narratives or assessments (Arminen, 2000; Charteris-Black, 2014; van Leeuwen, 2007). There is a certain sensitization within the institutional context to immigrants and refugees regarding their financial situation and their personal lives. 

The legal rulings below are notifications from the first trimester of 2020 in which the complexities of mobility seem reduced to a legal decision. All the same, the argument is circumstantial. Bosworth in his ethnographic study of detention centres in England describes the institutional interaction with immigrants as not a very comfortable procedure and even in negative situations requires moral recognition (2006: 151). Moral recognition is linked to who becomes visible or remains invisible in terms of legal residence, citizenship or deportation (Domenech, 2015; Marinucci, 2016). Within the Federal Police context, immigration is not necessarily about human diaspora. There is a sociology of actors involved in the legal ruling; circumstantial arguments must be organized and represented according to truth values in institutional knowledge vis à vis social imagery and social indifference (Angermuller, 2017; Bloor, 1991; Herzfeld, 1992; van Dijk, 2014). The notifications are electronic publications in which there are details as to the date, location and time of the publication, the signing agent and other dates and times regarding the period of overstay, infraction terms or expulsion dates, the values of fines. In Example 1, the argument is circumstantial. Mobility and an irregular situation reflect a contradiction. On the one hand, the immigrant has a family, there is obviously a lifeworld – a certain stability. Nevertheless being in an irregular migratory situation causes a certain stagnation in terms of legal mobility within the country, in addition to economic vulnerability, there is legal precarity. 

Example 1 A circumstantial argument 

The argument is constructed as a narrative in which the federal agent provides details as to the foreigner's trajectory, his limited income and his life in Brazil. The narrative is not just about institutional closure but provides a more humane perspective as to a foreigner and his family's lifeworld through his simple description of his existence in the country.

Example 2

The example below is another anecdote for institutional migratory purposes. Again, there is a certain awareness of a lifeworld – a life in a new country has already been started. The text obviously implies a visit to the foreigner's domicile or a prior interaction in which knowledge of her situation leads to cancellation of the fine for being in an irregular situation in the country. 

Example 3 is a narrative that traces a Venezuelan woman's life in terms of family and economic constraints. The fine is cancelled given the family's low income. 

Example 4 

In this last example, an Angolan woman lives under low income conditions. She lives with her sister but does not earn enough to pay the fine for her irregular stay in the country. She is not however criminalized. The fine is waived as she fits the economic insufficiency profile.