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Abstract
This chapter considers the impact of the police’s increased involvement in migration control. How (and with what consequences) do criminalization, migration, race, and gender intersect when the police are asked to respond to migration and fears about migrants? Drawing on empirical research on police custody suites, the piece discusses how the policing of migration questions the presence of minority ethnic groups in the UK, the wider implications for those who cannot belong, and how procedures are racialized. It also highlights the widening reach of the police, whose work is increasingly carried out in conjunction with other actors including those who have been enlisted to surveil, report, and help enforce migration policy. The chapter brings to light the everyday forms of racism renewed through the policing of migrants while exploring how those who are deemed risky, not belonging, criminal, or a threat to social and economic resources are racialized.
... By contrast, citizenship status, and the exclusionary practices directed at those legally deemed non-citizens and 'aliens', have received considerable attention within criminology, sociology and socio-legal studies, particularly in the field often labelled crimmigration scholarship and border criminologies (see inter alia Aas and Bosworth, 2013;Barker, 2018;Bosworth et al., 2018;Franko, 2020;Stumpf, 2006). This body of work has provided ample documentation not only of the punitive and exclusionary policies stemming from the nature of contemporary citizenship regimes, but also of how they intersect with racialization (García, 2017;Parmar, 2018), ethnicity (Franko, 2020), gender (Canning, 2019;Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013) and class (Melossi, 2003). ...
... As Vázquez (2018) points out, the enactment and implementation of migration and crime laws and policies in the United States have shaped and been shaped by race and racism. In recent years, the omission has been remedied by several contributions that have brought racialization and racism to the forefront of current scholarly attention (see inter alia Bosworth et al., 2018;Parmar, 2018). Issues of citizenship and the illegalization of migration create a complexity, which in important ways challenges the capability of intersectionality's model (Sanchez, 2017: 52). ...
... These distinctions are situated within racialized, classed and post-colonial contexts. Accordingly, several observers have pointed out that 'migrant' is a racially coded label (De Genova and Peutz, 2010;Parmar, 2018), which is, as Basaran and Guild (2017: 273) suggest, reserved for those associated with particular origins and geographies, embedded in colonial politics and sustained in post-colonial imaginaries. ...
Intersectionality scholarship has yet to systematically recognize the importance of citizenship status for the mutual shaping of inequalities. In this article, we bring attention to the combined structuring force of criminal law and citizenship status (and the related concepts of ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ status) in intersecting with other categories of social disadvantage, such as those created by racialization, class, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with women in prisons for ‘foreign nationals’ and health clinics for ‘undocumented’ migrants in Norway and Denmark, this article shows how citizenship status has a central role in the co-constitution of gendered, classed and racialized social disadvantages.
... This example of 'crimmigration' (Stumpf 2006) in practice in Britain has found that discretionary practices are employed particularly towards visible racial minorities. Despite the policy's prescription that every suspect who is booked into police custody should have an immigration check performed, the reality was that the policy was selectively applied at the officer's (police or immigration) discretion and particularly towards visible racial minorities who, according to the officers' perceptions, did not sound or look British (Parmar 2018a). ...
... The capacity for border policing to enact social-sorting practices informed by stereotypes has also signalled the extraordinary power of discretion, specifically in migration control (Lyon 2007;Weber 2011). In England and Wales, nationality acts as a proxy for race through programs such as Nexus, whereby mostly visible, racial minorities are asked to confirm their British nationality or right to remain in the UK as it is assumed that they do not legitimately belong to the country (Parmar 2018a). Recourse to immigration enforcement is often opportunistic and forms a web of invisible policing in Australia (Boon-Kuo 2019), and global surveillance tactics are multilayered, ensnaring racial minorities through visa checks and no-fly lists (Bowling and Westenra 2018; Nagra and Maurutto 2019). ...
Discretionary practices have often been put forward to explain the racially disproportionate patterns we see in policing. The focus on discretion rather than racism neatly shifts attention away from race and instead towards discretionary practices, which are notoriously amorphous and inscrutable. The attention towards discretion (rather than race) further allows race to operate without being explicitly named and, therefore, to operate as an absent present. In this article, I discuss how race and discretion work together when ordinary police officers are tasked with migration control duties to identify foreign national offenders. Drawing on empirical research conducted in England, I propose the concept of racialised discretion and argue that it holds merit because it recognises that certain discretionary practices and decisions are animated because of race, through race and with the effect (intentional or not) of racially disproportionate outcomes. The article argues for the need for racialised discretion to be seen as distinct from other forms of discretion both in policing and the criminal justice process more widely.
... Once the shock of detention and the stress of grasping the situation subsides, strong feelings of anger about being treated differently than those with British citizenship take over (see also Parmar 2018). Being detained begins to act as a challenge to national and cultural affiliations of belonging and disregards socialization into and contributions toward the UK. ...
... For more on Operation Nexus, seeGriffiths (2017) andParmar (2018).Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
In the context of heightened debate around increasingly hostile immigration policies, the detention and deportation of people with long-standing connections to the United Kingdom (UK) have, within the last few years, received public attention. Such individuals—people who were born in or came to the UK as children—make up a significant proportion of the “foreign criminal” population in detention. This article examines how those individuals with long-standing links, who also have criminal convictions, are often “erased” by the British state. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with men currently and formerly held in immigration removal centers, I argue that institutional failings in immigration and local authority care “guide” some who grow up in the UK toward (and into) the criminal justice system. Shunning responsibility for these failings, the British state enacts a further punishment through immigration detention and attempted deportation. Despite acts that resist and problematize foreignness, detained “Brits” experience specific harms that change the way they feel about identity and belonging in Britain. These processes highlight the ways that national identity and immigration status intersect with class, gender and race to produce traumatic experiences of cultural denationalization.
... Across Europe, domestic police not only check immigration status but also run detention centres and enforce removals and deportations. In the UK, they are now required to check the immigration status of suspects, in order to help identify 'high harm' offenders who may be deported (Parmar, 2017). In Australia, the Department of Immigration has been renamed the Department of Immigration and Border Protection where its most high profile and contentious operations are led by a new Australian Border Force with expanded powers that reach beyond those of traditional police officers. ...
... Police too are not always happy about their new powers and responsibilities to guard the border; the federal programme known as 'secure communities' in the US was initially rejected by a number of police forces (Cha´con, 2012: 629). In the UK scholars have found some confusion among officers about the new focus of their work on foreign nationals, preferring instead to work on combating more traditional crime (Parmar, 2017). Similar matters have been identified in Holland (Woude and Van der Brouwer, 2017). ...
This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. The article examines the renewed salience of defending borders and drawing boundaries between members and non-members, as well as the shifting focus of penal power from issues of imprisonment and morality, towards questions of immobilization and expulsion from the polity. By doing so, it also addresses the gaps in the existing theories and narratives about penality, which fail to take properly into account the implications of global connectivity, while overlooking enduring matters of racial and class inequity. Finally, the article points out how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all.
... Contemporary visa regimes have deepened that unequal access to global movement in a process that brings to the fore the intimate connection between global inequalities, race, and criminalization (Mongia, 1999). As border criminologists explained, the contemporary regulation of migration in countries around the globe relies upon and reinforces longstanding racial hierarchies, and racialized ideas of national identity and belonging (Aliverti, 2016;Barker, 2018;Bowling and Westenra, 2018;Parmar, 2018). By exploring migration control regimes, some criminologists have not only demonstrated the endurance of race in penal power but also its elasticity for shaping the criminal question (Bosworth et al., 2008;Weber and Bowling, 2004). ...
In the last years there has been a growing effort from different theoretical perspectives to interrogate critically the impact of colonialism in the past and present of institutions and practices of crime control, both at the central and peripheral contexts, as well as in the production of knowledge in the criminological field. In this feature piece we examine this debate. We offer a critical account of key themes and problems that emerge from the intimate relationship between colonialism and punishment that directly challenge the persistent neglect of these dimensions in mainstream criminological scholarship. We aim to foreground the relevance of this relationship to contemporary enquiries. We highlight that decolonization did not dismantle the colonial roots of the cultural, social and political mechanisms informing contemporary punishment. They are still very much part of criminal justice practice and are thus also central to criminological knowledge productions.
... In this example, it was the skin colour, gender and 'suspicious' location of the persons in question that raised suspicion among members of the public, which was in turn confirmed by the police officers. Since the police officers were acting upon preexisting documentation, they were further able to denounce criticism for racial profiling; they were not the ones initiating the searches but were simply following up on existing 'evidence' (see Parmar 2018Parmar , 2019. The police whom Lisa followed recalled having been criticised by shopkeepers in certain areas of the city, who felt discriminated against as their shops were regularly targeted by police controls due to their location and multicultural clientele. ...
Deportation regimes mobilise coercive state powers, but also entail extensive paperwork, the latter of which remains underexplored in deportation studies. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in border police units and a migration-related detention centre in Sweden, this article explores how bureaucratic practices of detecting, detaining and ultimately deporting people whose presence has been illegalised are enforced and legitimated through the use of paperwork. Paperwork, we argue, becomes the ‘signature of the state’ that enables state agencies to assert themselves as ‘rational’ actors, even when their own practices are ridden by dilemmas, inconsistency and sometimes arbitrariness. We show how the same documents that are meant to ensure fairness and accountability in bureaucratic processes may render state actions even more unreadable, and further serve to rationalise and legitimise intrusive, violent and discriminatory state actions. The article thus highlights the importance of considering the often-tedious paperwork as essential to the operation of coercive state powers, such as the detainment and deportation of illegalised persons.
... Many other scholars have advanced similar hypotheses by observing that the connections between policing and immigration have expanded as a consequence of the increased blurring of criminal justice and migration governance (Parmar, 2018). The point seems to be that immigration law provides the police with a more easily navigable alternative to the criminal law for dealing with minor offences (Fabini, 2017;Weber, 2012;Weber and Pickering, 2013) or pursuing anti-terrorism objectives (Roach, 2011), and this is precisely the core of our argument here. ...
Drawing on an empirical study, this article explores the role of immigration detention in Italy by analysing the way a specific rhetoric of ‘dangerousness’ has developed and is being used within the framework of immigration enforcement policies. Our argument is that immigration detention has been transformed into an instrument of crime prevention and ‘social defence’, and that this transformation is fuelled by the central position that the legal categories of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ have assumed in the regulation of the return procedure. The article contends that immigration law enforcement agencies can make use of immigration detention as a flexible control tool to manage what are perceived as the most problematic populations in urban areas, thus practising a policy of selective enforcement that while not explicitly built along racial and ethnic lines, clearly discriminates among migrants according to their ‘social marginality’ or supposed ‘social dangerousness’.
... Operation Nexus has received critical attention for its targeting of vulnerable and racialized groups and has been challenged legally (Evans, 2018;Luqmani Thompson & Partners, 2014;Webber, 2013Webber, , 2015. Nexus practices allow nationality to act as a proxy for race, enabling frequent nationality checks for low-level offending to be carried out for visible minorities in particular, while being framed as ostensibly race neutral (Parmar, 2018a). Despite the stated policy aim of Nexus to target prolific and serious foreign national offenders, in fact, Nexus accentuates criminality among non-citizens by using potential future criminality based on police intelligence, as well as low-level, ancient convictions (which remain on the police database even if charges are withdrawn) to build cases to deport foreign national offenders. ...
In this article I examine ‘Operation Nexus’, a collaborative initiative between the police and immigration enforcement in the UK, and its impact on foreign national and minority ethnic suspects of offending. I explain how strategic policing aims to manage migration around notions such as ‘high harm’ offenders, target those who appear ‘foreign’ as well as visible ethnic minority suspects, the latter of which may hold citizenship in the UK. The consequences of Operation Nexus are therefore wider than its stated aim because it legitimizes racial profiling by the police and has negative consequences on notions of belonging for racialized foreign nationals and citizens albeit in different ways. By presenting empirical research with those who implement Operation Nexus as well as those who experience it, I elucidate how the policing of migration revives and extends colonial premises that connect nationality, race and criminalization within the expanding and merging realm of contemporary criminal justice and migration control. I draw on Lerman and Weaver’s thesis that when contemporary criminal justice policies disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities, they create an unequal group of people that are exiled within their own society and disenfranchised from public institutions such as the police.
... Similarly, a British accent was an indication of being 'home grown' and likely to be British when other proxies (name, place of birth or ethnicity) made the person suspect. As evidence of the racialization of British citizenship through immigration enforcement (Chacón and Coutin, 2018;Parmar, 2018;Romero, 2008), non-white suspects 'who claim to be British' were often singled out for further immigration checks. Immigration officers relied on custody databases to identify foreigners, where individuals with names that were considered less likely to be British were checked against immigration systems. ...
This article examines the contemporary role of the police in patrolling the nation’s territorial and social borders. The police play an important role in framing ideas and perceptions of order and disorder. By selecting when and against whom to apply coercion, the police not only constitute crime and criminals. They shape the boundaries of civility and patrol the margins of citizenship. Such role has been revitalized lately as they are tasked with immigration enforcement functions. Drawing on an empirical examination of immigration–police cooperation in England, I explore how police and immigration officers define the remits of their job and work alongside each other in everyday policing. I argue that the reliance on immigration enforcement by the police evinces the limitations of modern policing to decipher the new geographies of crime and disorder, and their difficulties in offering a reassuring response to public anxieties and ultimately in producing social order.
... Arguably, these police officers were vindicated by Ricardo's deportation, and their discriminatory policing practices were sanctioned by the exclusionary and expulsive logic of immigration control. Home Office policy and policing practices, then, are also inevitably in dialogue, and this is reinforced by specific institutional arrangements which marry policing work with bordering functions (see Parmar 2018). ...
In this paper, I examine the experiences of Jason and Ricardo, two men who were deported to Jamaica from the UK following criminal conviction. This ethnographic inquiry into deportation provides a rich and complex account of race-making at different scales. Theorizing the connections between racialization and illegalization offers a productive framework for the study of racism in multi-status Britain. The paper argues that the border is central to race’s contemporary mobilization, not only in the lives of individuals like Jason and Ricardo but also for those interpellated as “natives”.
This article uses testimonies from private sector staff about their experiences of working in sites of short-term immigration detention and in facilitating deportation, to explore the material conditions of this form of custodial labour. Until now, most criminological accounts of criminal justice or border staff have paid little attention to them as workers. As a result, the connections between sites and practices of custody and capital have been obscured. Drawing on a range of scholarship about the labour market and the nature of work, the piece concludes by advocating for new alliances to challenge the precarity and poverty that both lead people into these jobs and justifies them and the exclusionary and divisive politics they engender.
This paper examines how deportation became a solution to rough sleeping in pre-Brexit England. It identifies relationships between the social regulation of vulnerable and marginalised adults, contemporary governance arrangements and bordering practices characteristic of Britain's ‘hostile environment’. Drawing on media reports and grey organisational literature, the focus of discussion is events across 2015–2018 in which three London-based charities were criticised for working with the Home Office to deport homeless migrants under its European Economic Area Administrative Removal policy. The overall tenor of criticism was that collaboration with the government compromised the organisations’ independence and charitable missions and aims. This diminished their capacity to both advocate for vulnerable adults and effectively challenge oppressive state practices. The paper observes how state and nonprofit relations structure institutional and socio-legal responses to marginalised and ‘othered’ adults through commissioning and contracting mechanisms. It demonstrates that the social and legal control of homeless migrants may be differently constituted by institutions delivering services in relation to citizenship, vulnerability and marginalisation. This analysis incorporates a broader appraisal of institutional motivations, values and beliefs in social welfare delivery, including the historic role of charitable agencies in the criminalisation of social welfare users. Taken together, the paper offers an interdisciplinary critique of the relationships between border control, neoliberal governance and the sociocultural and historic construction of homeless migrants.
Australia’s detention-deportation regime is setting the agenda for New Zealand’s domestic criminal justice system, with implications for criminological understandings of ‘crimmigration’ and ‘bordered penality’. In response to recent changes in Australian migration law which have seen an increased number of deportations to Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Zealand government introduced legislation, the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) (“ROMI”) Act 2015, which created a monitoring regime for returning New Zealanders convicted of criminal offending in an overseas jurisdiction. The sentence an individual is subject to in Australia is extended, both geographically and temporally, creating multiple punishments for this particular group of offenders. While ostensibly modelled from domestic parole arrangements, in practice the ROMI regime entails greater restriction while offering less in the way of legal protection. The differential treatment of returning New Zealanders is sustained through their discursive construction as both “criminals” and de facto “aliens”. By treating returnees as threatening outsiders to be contained, rather than vulnerable people to be supported, the New Zealand state also extends the risk logics underpinning the Australian regime. Although the ROMI Act is novel, the regime conforms to the racialised patterns of exclusion and criminalisation which have persisted in Aotearoa New Zealand since colonisation.
The perspective of intersectionality has gained widespread scholarly interest and been employed across many different disciplines, including criminology. This perspective focuses on interlocking systems of oppression and the need to work toward structural changes to promote social justice and equity. The present article aimed to explore the potential of intersectionality for advancing health research and policy regarding justice-involved women, in different phases of the judicial process, based on the extant literature.
First, employing an intersectional approach to analyze the issue of health during the pre-incarceration period may facilitate identification of the structural and representational factors underlying the barriers that women face in obtaining health services, which elevates the risk to their health. Furthermore, adopting an intersectionality perspective to explore women’s health during incarceration may shed light on vulnerable, invisible subpopulations of women such as incarcerated older women and their health problems, and help identify the structural barriers to carceral health services and the role of stigma in inflicting and normalizing harmful practices within prison walls. In addition, an intersectionality lens highlights the risk of unintended use of scholarly knowledge regarding the health of justice-involved women. Last, an intersectionality perspective is particularly relevant for research of the reentry of justice-involved women. In particular, it can be used to examine gender-sensitive reentry services that ignore other axes of marginalization, such as class and race, generating a powerful dynamic that results in partial service, denial of access to therapeutic resources, and possible exposure to health-damaging environments.
Through an exploration of the extant literature on justice-involved women, I endeavored to demonstrate that an intersectional framework offers powerful tools to both challenge and strengthen gender frameworks within criminology. This will make it possible to move beyond consideration of gender alone, to understand how systems of oppression based on race, age and other social locations intersect and combine to construct health disadvantages among justice-involved women. This highlights the needs for a new research agenda and policy that integrate the intersectional framework with health theories to provide a more developed understanding of health among justice-involved women.
Crimmigration—the conflation of migration control with criminal justice control—serves to legitimise tough responses to mobility, especially by persons without fully provable rights to enter and remain in the UK. In this nexus, harm is politically framed as one of migrant harm to citizens, legitimising a hostile environment of detention, deportation and civil exclusion. This chapter addresses two elite narratives in the nexus for providing our gendered and racial ways of seeing the wrong sort of migrant. Framed in a culture of fear and stranger-making, the first narrative on nationhood constructs the foreigner as crimmigrant—someone deviant or dangerous, to be watched and evicted. Framed as a drain on society, the second narrative on duplicity stories non-citizens as bogus and non-contributory. Based on lived experience, undocumented females re-story the crimmigrant harm as one of their unjust treatment by the State and re-tell the civil harm as one of their exploitation at the hands of policy makers, employers, and unscrupulous citizens. In an alternate telling of political stories, women counter their wrongfulness to one of their wrongful ideation under our given lens for seeing the wrong sort of migrant.
This article considers how state-controlled borders and bordering practices are conceptualized, what they symbolize, and the consequences of these representations. By analyzing critically the metaphors that are used to describe borders and migration, and by drawing on empirical research on policing migration in the United Kingdom, an alternative metaphor, where borders are depicted heuristically as mirrors, may be instructive for capturing the multiple functions of borders and their racializing consequences. I propose that borders and their control across Western liberal democracies are like mirrors that represent, reflect and, at times, deflect the reality of exclusionary attitudes and the racialized anxieties they foment. Harnessing the function of borders through a process of self-reflection, where societies hold a mirror to themselves, may be both instructive and transformative. By reconsidering the metaphors employed in relation to migration, the article contributes to interdisciplinary debates on border studies, critical race perspectives and the criminalization of mobility.
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In Spain, where prison studies have not been developed extensively, little attention has been paid to analyzing the trajectories and specificities of the foreign population in the prison system—in particular, those of women. Moreover, over the few last decades, the Spanish prison system has undergone several transformations due to the implementation of new correctional programs, such as the “Respect Modules” (Módulos de Respeto), which promote the participation of the prisoners in the organization of their units, implement a different system of evaluation of prisoners’ behavior, and introduce a new set of rules inside the units. This article analyzes the trajectories of foreign national women prisoners in Spain, focusing on the impact of citizenship, gender, race, and social class on daily life in prison, with particular emphasis on the enactment of practices of self-government. The article contributes to the growing body of literature that shows how the interaction between criminal law and immigration law alters the general aim of social reintegration for prisoners. In addition, the article offers new insights on the particular effects of penal responsibilization projects on different groups of prisoners
Border criminologists have highlighted how, in recent years, the police, courts and prisons in England and Wales have started to look different, as they have been injected with practices of immigration control. In this article, I suggest that alongside such overt changes, the border might also be permeating the criminal justice system in a more insidious way. Specifically, I examine how the racialized narratives circulated by the British government and media in the current era that stigmatize “unwanted” migrants and legitimize practices of enforcement against them—which we can understand as dominant narratives of bordering—are seeping into sentencing hearings. Drawing on observations conducted in Crown Courts in London, I explore how one of the key racialized narratives of bordering—that of the abusive cheat who manipulates the United Kingdom’s immigration system—is mobilized in the individual narratives delivered by legal professionals during the sentencing process to help construct and negotiate unwanted migrants’ punishability.
In this article, I examine the changing nature of punishment under conditions of mass mobility. Drawing on research conducted in immigration removal centres in the UK, I will show how porous boundaries between administrative penalties and criminal penalties have made the two systems co-constitutive and, in so doing, have drawn into question the liberal foundations of punishment. As foreigners face additional, administrative burdens and are subject to processes of differentiation and exclusion simply by virtue of their citizenship, I suggest, basic values of due process, fairness and equality of treatment and outcome, are drawn into question. As a consequence, justice itself is transformed.
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