Applying Milgram: Understanding Immigration Enforcement Workers
In his classic study of obedience to authority, psychologist Stanley Milgram contends that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”
Indeed, in the face of authority, ordinary people can become instruments that serve and fulfill authority’s demands, as demonstrated by the case of current immigration efforts, in particular, the detention of immigrant children. The fact that American immigration enforcement workers implemented the government’s orders shows Milgram’s findings to be true, specifically the imagined binding factors and agentic shift that subdue consciences and coerce ordinary individuals to become “agents in a terrible destructive process.” In an article entitled “Ordinary Americans Carried out Inhumane Acts for Trump,” journalist Chris Edelson writes: When we worry and wonder about authoritarian regimes that inflict cruelty on civilians, we often imagine tyrannical despots unilaterally advancing their sinister agendas. But no would-be autocrat can act alone. As a practical matter, he needs subordinates willing to carry out orders. Of course, neither Donald Trump nor Steve Bannon personally detained any of the more than 100 people held at airports over the weekend pursuant to the administration’s executive order on immigration, visitation and travel to the United States. They relied on assistance.
Understanding why immigration workers continued to do a job that would require them to handcuff a 5-year-old child, hold a mother and her child for 20 hours without food, and detain and separate thousands of children from their asylum-seeking guardians, to many, is a painful and difficult task. Milgram is helpful in shedding light on this issue, however, tracing immigration workers’ willingness to uphold their job to “binding factors.” Binding factors, as the phrase suggests, are factors that keep individuals “locked” into their current state. For Milgram’s experiment, the binding factors were “politeness on his [the subject’s] part, his desire to uphold his initial promise of aid to the experimenter, and the awkwardness of withdrawal.”
Binding factors in the case of immigration enforcement workers are much more encompassing, including both historical and economic factors. The very act of immigration has always been inherently exclusive and racially or ethnically motivated. The genesis of federal action in overseeing immigration began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Despite making up only .002 of the population, Chinese immigrants were heavily portrayed as a threat to Americans’ job opportunities and thus blamed for the weak economy.
Immigration laws continued in this trend, going so far as to halt all Asian immigration, as well as naturalization for those already on American soil. Though explicit efforts to ban entire races are no longer present, we see the same tactics currently used against certain groups of people, specifically immigrants crossing from the US-Mexico border and individuals from highly Muslim countries. Because the United States has a long history of exclusionary immigration efforts, current immigration policies and practices seem no less out of the ordinary. Furthermore, the dehumanizing characterization of the aforementioned people as bad, illegal, job-stealing, etc. helps to make following cruel orders easier. The devaluation of these people, too, provides a justification and a binding factor.
In addition to this long tradition, economics plays a large role in explaining why American immigration enforcement workers stay in their situation. The economic binding factor is much simpler and much more personal than the historical binding factor. For the workers at detention centers or at customs and border protection, unlike Milgram’s experiment where the participation is voluntary and the incentive is most probably nonfinancial, this is a skill, a profession, a livelihood, and more. Although the workers may not enjoy the work that they do, being able to support themselves and their family may be enough for them to continue following the orders.
Binding factors are only one stage in understanding why immigration officers enforce orders that may, under different circumstances, prick their conscience and question the morality of their actions. In his experiment, Milgram explains that in social settings, individuals either act on their own volition or enter an agentic state where they “carry out orders of an authority figure and do not feel responsible for their actions.” The transition from acting on one’s own volition to following another person’s orders in such a way and to such an extent that one no longer feels responsible for one’s own actions marks an agentic shift that involves a self-erasure of agency and responsibility and that in turn diminishes and even undermines one’s own personhood.
The historical and economic bases shed light on why (certain) people are initially inclined to be obedient to authority. The Milgram experiment and the case of immigration enforcement workers show how institutions can be very powerful in keeping individuals obedient to authority, thus triggering an agentic shift.
In “The Perils of Obedience,” Milgram argues that “[t]he problem of obedience is not wholly psychological.” Institutions and the role that they play in creating divisions of labor in our society make obeying authority much easier, for “the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of over-all direction.”
An individual undergoing an agentic shift, working as only one part of a greater machine, finds submitting to authority easier because it allows subjects to release themselves from personal responsibility for their own actions. Workers are not doing any wholly important task but instead working towards something greater and impersonal: an institution, an idea that we are taught from a young age to respect authority, especially in an impersonal, institutionalized form. This is seen in Milgram’s experiment as subjects respecting Yale University and the institution of science and research. For immigration enforcement workers, they are only serving the greatest and most legitimate authority in the nation — the United States government. Furthermore, because their own jobs and tasks are only part of a larger, nationally sweeping order, their role feels small and inconsequential in comparison to that of the federal government. While outsiders can see the whole of the operation, those acting within immigration enforcement agencies may only perceive themselves as a guard at a door or a paper pusher in an office, just as Adolf Eichmann didn’t feel responsible for the mass murders of Jewish people despite working in a death camp. The social influence of obedience can be very compelling for individuals subject to an authority. It is necessary, however, to also discuss conformity’s influence in manufacturing the same results. Obedience and conformity, while both an “abdication of initiative,” though manifesting differently, can be present at the same time.
Milgram explains the distinction between the two as follows: “Consider a recruit who enters military service. He scrupulously carries out the orders of his superiors. At the same time, he adopts the habits, routines, and language of his peers. The former represents obedience and the latter, conformity.” Similarly, in the real-life case, a worker acting on behalf of the United States government carries out the orders of their superiors and becomes part of a peer group doing similar work. These two social influencers tend to compel a worker to continue on with their job if both the worker’s peers and the authority are working towards the same end. In fact, this may bolster the workers to behave obediently. For instance, when Milgram’s subject worked as part of a group, playing only an intermediary role in the shocking of the “student,” the disobedience and refusal to participate was 3/40. Milgram explains this as being “doubly absolved from responsibility,” for 1) the responsibility in the agentic state has been transferred from the subject to the authority and 2) the subject operates only as a link or “supportive function” towards the goal of a certain inhumane act, and the act is therefore easily digested since the worker didn’t themselves commit the act.
Furthermore, if none of the workers exhibits disobedience towards the authority, it is in the interest of a particular worker to also not exhibit disobedience for the sake of conformity. Therefore, workers may find themselves compelled to obey not only by authority but also by those of similar status both inside and outside of the working environment.
Milgram’s experiment offers an invaluable lens to the case of immigration enforcement officers in understanding why ordinary (and otherwise decent) people do terrible things in the face of authority. And the conclusion is thus: the factors that bind a person to their work, that keep them obedient to their superiors or to their like-minded peers, can overpower the individual conscience. A transformative insight, this conclusion can direct those interested in change and reform to a more productive direction. Instead of looking to change historical, economic, and social influencing factors, the focus of reforms needs to be centered around how institutions work. Though there are great differences between Milgram’s experiment and the current state of immigration policy enforcement in terms of the scope of historical, racial, and economic factors, it is important to remember that Milgram’s experiment was inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, too, a very different situation from his trials. Nevertheless, as Milgram writes, “the essence of certain relationships remains.”
