Empathizing with the Unsympathetic? A Methodological Reflection 

Guest post by Irene I. Vega. Irene I. Vega is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Vega’s primary line of research examines how the intersection of legal and policy mandates, bureaucratic culture, and political processes shapes immigration enforcement. Her recently published book, Bordering on Indifference: How Immigration Agents Negotiate Race and Morality (Princeton University Press) draws on fieldwork with Border Patrol Agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers to examine the production of bureaucratic indifference on the frontlines of immigration control. As a Hellman Fellow, Vega has a new project mapping the experiences of upward mobility across groups in Southern California. 

Can researchers be reliable narrators of the life worlds of people they disagree with? Can we dislike our respondents—or the actions they are engaged in—and still serve as honest brokers of their worldviews? What are the costs, analytic and otherwise, that accrue to researchers who study polarizing groups with neutrality, contrived or genuine? And finally, what does it mean to empathize with the unsympathetic? I have asked these and similar questions repeatedly over the past decade, as I have studied and written about U.S. Border Patrol Agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers working along the U.S.-Mexico border. I consider these questions more in depth in the methodological appendix of my book, Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality.  

In this reflection I have a narrower task, and I won’t bury the lede: I want to call for more research on groups who sociologists and other social scientists may be unsympathetic towards, due to their politics and/or their positions of power. That is, I want to call for more research that requires that we climb the wall of empathy to reach. I’ll admit this is not for everyone. It goes without saying that merely talking to people we disagree with—especially those who are engaged state-sanctioned harm of various sorts—is taxing. This kind of work is especially difficult in a research role where neutrality is a fundamental principle. And yet we must because as I have argued before, a sociology of exclusion is not complete without a sociology of power. Let me explain.

Sociologists like myself are interested in inequalities; we want to understand how they come to be, how they are perpetuated, and many of us have a deep-rooted commitment to dismantling them. What these interests and commitments have translated into is a vibrant sociology of marginalization and exclusion with a focus on people to whom we are sympathetic. Research on U.S. immigration enforcement is an example. Researchers have carefully and compassionately documented how immigration control devastates communities, particularly working-class immigrants of color and their descendants. This research is critical—and should continue—because it reveals the deleterious impacts of an immigration system that is more rooted in moral panics and racial myths than empirical and economic realities.  

But what about the people who implement this system? What about the ecology of local and federal politicians, private prison executives, frontline and back-of-the-house bureaucrats, security industry professionals, and other authorities that produce these outcomes? Should we not subject these powerholders to a researcher’s critical gaze? Should we not seek to understand how they make sense of their role in the various systems of inequality that they are embedded in? After all, it is their everyday actions and justifications that create and protect the status quo in the U.S. immigration system—why should we leave them off the hook? If we truly believe that research can make a change, and I think many of us do, then we need to take a more holistic view of the social problems we study. We need to do what the Anthropologist Laura Nader described as “studying up”, and we need to subject those in power to the same scrutiny we have applied to people that are the targets of power.

Reflecting on the distinction between sympathy and empathy may help generate more of this kind of work. Often, we—and here I am talking specifically about qualitative sociologists—erroneously assume that sympathy and empathy are one in the same. They are not. Mario Small reminds us that empathy is central to qualitative research because it is about vicarious understanding; it is about trying to see the world from another’s vantage point. Empathy is different from sympathy, which is about feeling sorrow for another person’s troubles and hardships. In practice, the boundaries between these emotions can be blurry and some even argue that we need one to reach the other. In contrast, I think we can and should seek empathy even when sympathy is absent.  

In my research with immigration agents, I have sought vicarious understanding—empathy—without achieving sympathy. I have sought to reveal agents’ deep-seated assumptions of immigrants and immigration, have worked hard to contextualize those assumptions within the legal, politico-bureaucratic, and cultural systems in which agents function, and have achieved a level of understanding that I lacked before I conducted my research.  

But I want to be very clear that understanding, which is about empathy, is very different from agreement, from experiencing sympathy toward agents, or from having anything that resembles a sense of loyalty to them or commitment to their actions. Quite the contrary—in my writings I have picked a side. And yet, I believe that if my respondents read my work, they would find it truthful, even if they disagree with my analysis of the ideas they take for granted as unproblematic and commonsensical. Afterall, that is our role as qualitative researchers. Our role is not to simply narrate the version of reality that is true for our respondents. We must also remain skeptical of that reality, make their reality an object of study, and reflect a more holistic social and structural account of their views back to our respondents and anyone else who will read our work. Studying the realities of people we are unsympathetic toward is key to the sociological enterprise in immigration studies and I encourage all of us to consider doing more of it.  

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