Street-Level Bureaucrats in the Irish Privatised Asylum Regime: Experiences and Professional Identity

Forced migration to Europe is growing in numbers and salience. In response, EU asylum services have been increasingly securitised, externalised and privatised. We investigate the functioning of marketised asylum regimes through the perspective of street-level bureaucrats (workers, civil servants and volunteers) working in the Irish asylum system, the only completely privatised asylum system in the EU. Interviews show that street-level bureaucrats’ experiences are negatively affected by the same systemic flaws previously found to be violating migrants’ rights. Furthermore, unlike civil servants and volunteers, staff of private reception centres detach their work and professional identity from the idea of belonging to an institutionalised asylum system, implicitly rejecting their role in perpetuating the system and their categorisation as street-level bureaucrats. We posit that this disconnection both influences and is caused by the marketised nature of the system, impeding the traditional role of street-level bureaucrats as bottom-up ‘policymakers’.