The Power of Norms

Based on surveys conducted in detention centers for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Austria and the Czech Republic, this paper examines the role these spaces play in producing the categories of “refugee” and “illegal alien.” This paper considers the ethnographic observation of interviews between state agents and detained migrants to be critical in understanding the institutional process of categorizing detained migrants, as well as the ways migrants adapt to and eventually circumvent the normative categories on which the institutional order in detention is based.