Contributors to this special issue realised that reflecting on experiences of getting access (or not) can tell us something important about the institutions we aimed to study and, more broadly, about the migration control field. Put differently, attempts at approaching and approximating state actors within a charged field exposed us to some of its most fundamental organising principles. We have, therefore, set ourselves the task in this issue of SA/AS to ask and answer the following question: What do attempts at studying migration control tell us about the state? Our exercise is, thus, squarely set as an attempt to intervene in a burgeoning debate around the ways in which the ‘anthropology of the state’ can develop. Both the issues at stake – the management of undesired others – and the field in which we conduct our studies, migration control administrations, are indeed changing to become acutely central to the governing of our societies. By gathering findings from different research projects across Europe, this special issue offers a comparative perspective on some of the most salient features of the migration control field from the eyes of ethnographic researchers in search of access.

This analysis of Swiss Federal Supreme Court judgements shows the coupling of welfare and migration control. Foreign nationals depending on social assistance might face the withdrawal of their residence permits. We show how the conveyed legal logics create conditionality of rights and a differentiation of (non-)citizens. The judgements individualise social assistance dependence and follow a neoliberal logic of economic participation. They establish rationalities which reinforce politics of belonging and welfare chauvinism.

Based on interviews with bureaucrats and judges in several Swiss cantons, this article analyzes how bureaucrats decide to order immigration detention and how the judicial review shapes their decisions. The authors argue that discretionary decision-making regarding immigration detention is structured by the web of relationships in which decision-makers are embedded and affected by the practices of other street-level actors. The varying cantonal configurations result in heterogenous bureaucratic practices that affect the profiles and numbers of persons being detained. In particular, differences in judges’ interpretation of legal principles, as well as in their expectations, strongly affect bureaucratic decisions.

This article recounts the failure to gain access to the Swiss asylum agency's ‘country of origin information’ (COI) unit and how it negatively impacted access to similar research sites in Europe. As producers of indispensable expert knowledge, these units play an important instrumental and symbolic role in asylum procedures and policies. Interpreted as a situated case of knowledge control, rather than a general resistance to research within the institution, the denial of access reveals how the intended research challenged gatekeepers’ idealised construction of COI – both as a type of knowledge and as a field of practice. The negotiation about access gradually shifted to other topics, such as the researcher's competence, the field's situation and the nature of legitimate knowledge – all related to politics of expertise and the COI units’ legitimising functions in the wider migration apparatus. The negotiation became a competition over cognitive authority and the monopoly of legitimate knowledge production about the field. By black‐boxing country information, the gatekeepers fostered the illegibility of bureaucratic processes and the legibility of the state as discourse. Analysing the 30‐month negotiation process also reveals the difficulties to seize the contours of the state when encountering transnational bureaucratic fields.

In recent years, scholarly interest in boundaries and boundary work, on the one hand, and borders and bordering, on the other, has flourished across disciplines. Notwithstanding the close relationship between the two concepts, “borders” and “boundaries” have largely been subject to separate scholarly debates, or sometimes treated as synonymous. These trends point to an important lack of conceptual and analytical clarity as to what borders and boundaries are and are not, what distinguishes them from each other and how they relate to each other. This Special Issue tackles this conceptual gap by bringing the two fields of studies together: we argue that boundaries/boundary work and borders/bordering should be treated as interrelated rather than distinct phenomena. Boundaries produce similarities and differences that affect the enforcement, performance and materialisation of borders, which themselves contribute to the reproduction of boundaries. Borders and boundaries are entangled, but they promote different forms and experiences of inclusion and exclusion. In this introduction, we elaborate the two concepts separately before examining possible ways to link them theoretically. Finally, we argue that an intersectional perspective makes it possible to establish how the interplay of different social categories affects the articulations and repercussions of borders and boundaries. The contributions in this Special Issue address this issue from multiple perspectives that reflect a variety of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds and are informed by different case studies in Europe and beyond.