The Good Decision-Maker or Protecting the System

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter explores how “digging deep”, which stands for the active “search for” inconsistencies in asylum seekers’ narratives in asylum interviews, becomes the morally correct thing for decision-makers to do. Building on Eckert (The Bureaucratic Production of Difference. transcript, Bielefeld, pp. 7–26, 2020) I challenge the depiction of bureaucracies as anethical and amoral. Ethics I understand not in a normative, but rather in an empirical sense, as the common good the administration is oriented towards. The chapter brings to light how particularly through fairness—both as a procedural norm and ethical value—digging deep is established as a routine, professionally necessary and desirable practice, which is connected to decision-makers’ role as “protectors of the system”. I argue that digging deep actively generates the “liars” and “false refugees” it sets out to “uncover”, thereby reinforcing the perception that, indeed, there “are” many false refugees which, again, strengthens the office’s and individual decision-makers’ endeavours to identify and exclude them from asylum.