 The Fine Art of Camouflage: Migrant-Drug Distributors Negotiating Police Interactions in SwitzerlandLouis Vuilleumier The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2023, vol. 709, issue 1, 165-183 Abstract: Bogged down in exploitative jobs or unemployment, some migrants mitigate their precarious condition and forced idleness through involvement in petty crime, including low-level drug distribution. This article explores the daily lives of migrants who navigate asymmetrical interactions and relationships with police in ways that avoid detection of their illicit activities. Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork and 18 biographical interviews with sub-Saharan male migrants active in low-level drug retail, I scrutinize how migrants negotiate the rules that are supposed to govern them. I am particularly interested in the ways in which migrants negotiate their legal status with the police, whose view of them is often heavily influenced by race. I demonstrate that relationships between police officers and migrants can be influenced by migrants’ deliberate mimicry of local norms, calculated conformity with informal policing practices, and influence over police officers’ moral judgment of whether they are deserving of police’s discretionary power to look the other way. Keywords: drug trafficking; migration; racial profiling; discretion; cop wisdom; illegibility; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:709:y:2023:i:1:p:165-183 DOI: 10.1177/00027162241248998 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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