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Arresting (non)Citizenship: The Policing Migration Nexus of Nationality, Race and Criminalization
Abstract
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.
... The first wave of research on racial profiling was concentrated on encounters with law enforcement while driving. The developing research field has since examined racial profiling from a range of perspectives, such as the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, border and migration controls, as well as policies that target stigmatized urban areas and their populations (for recent contributions, see Gaston, 2019;Parmar, 2020;Welch, 2019). These studies have convincingly shown that racial bias regulates police work in different national and regional contexts. ...
... Based on this theoretical framework, we address racism within law enforcement not as an anomaly, but as part of the interconnection of local and global power relations (Owusu-Bempah, 2017;Parmar, 2020) that structure the relation between race, policing and space (Dikeç, 2007;Fassin, 2013;Rios, 2011). We argue that criminalization is an embedded aspect of the social order upheld through racializing policing practices (Armenta, 2017). ...
... As such, the clothing is a marker of race, class and place, as well as gender and age, that exceeds binary categories such as white/non-white, ethnic minority/majority as well as citizen/non-citizen. The boundaries of belonging upheld through practices of racial profiling should therefore be explored in the intersection of axes of inequality (Parmar, 2020), as well as in the interlinked relation between racialized notions of crime and racialized processes of criminalization (Armenta, 2017). What makes bodies 'stick out' or 'blend in' in the racial welfare state is a complex question, and it is therefore central to explore the multifaceted ways that the police enforce community. ...
This article builds on two interview studies on racial profiling conducted in Finland and Sweden. It examines policing practices in order to elaborate on the understanding of what we define as the ‘racial welfare state’. The analysis draws attention to the ways that bordering practices reproduce racial orders, within and beyond the nation-state. The embeddedness of the Nordic region in the western sphere, with its colonial legacies, is highlighted through the empirical material that focuses on the consequences of internal and external migration controls, as well as more general police stop-and-search practices. The study underlines the need to investigate racial profiling as a practice that enforces an imagined community based not on whiteness in general, but on Nordic whiteness in particular as the norm against which the bodies of ‘others’ are measured.
... In this example, it was the skin colour, gender and 'suspicious' location of the persons in question that raised mistrust among members of the public, which was in turn confirmed by the police officers. Since the police officers were acting on pre-existing 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 criticized 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. ...
... In this example, it was the skin colour, gender and 'suspicious' location of the persons in question that raised mistrust among members of the public, which was in turn confirmed by the police officers. Since the police officers were acting on pre-existing 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 criticized 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. ...
... In this regard, given that the services offered are those necessary for the continuation of life-ones taken for granted by residents of the place to which people migrate-migrants are pitied for their situation by residents, and donations to their cause are as a result of this pity [13]. Simultaneously, migrants are not trusted [14] to be satisfied with hand-outs and are viewed as likely to resort to anti-social activity [15] to retain necessities. Specific social, economic, and political hierarchies and policies are recognized to produce and pattern poor health in migrants [16]. ...
... It is for this reason that there was no consideration of other forms. 15 ...
Migrate is a verb representing a process where the intention of providing social services to migrants is to reduce their instability and discomfort. Consequently, social service providers are inclined to view migrants as pitiful, often also those to be feared, with migrants learning to form negative views of themselves, decreasing their mental health. Considering migration as a verb neglects the noun initiating the migration when the migrant is heading to a person, place, thing, event, or idea. In viewing migration as noun-dependent, the migrant is identifiable as self-directed in seeking aid rather than pitiful or inciting fear. This study aims to examine the types of nouns migrants conceptualize for guiding their migration based on a Google Scholar search of “[noun-type] to which [whom] migrants head in their migration” for each noun type regarding the four most highly cited reports published since 2020. The purpose is to determine the social services applicable to migrants in their self-direction regarding theoretical foundations that contrast problem-focused with emotion-focused coping. Viewing such migration nouns as essential migration signifiers encourages migrants’ favorable identification. In recognizing the intended self-direction of the migrant, their mental health is improved and is supportable through relevant and appropriately available social services.
... He observes that the "stigma of criminal foreignness and 'illegality,' " which includes detention and deportation, "are facets of immigration policy [with] which many immigrant communities, in particular Latino communities, have been intimately acquainted for generations" (Hernandez, 2008, p. 37). Fear of detention and deportation amongst Latino communities is not new, despite the ramping up of border control in recent decades, and is not limited to non-citizens (see also Parmar, 2020). Hernandez (2008) argues that the long-standing racialized criminalization of Latinos as "illegals" means that detainability and deportability affect citizens as well. ...
... It is, in sum, important to include immigration detention and border control within movements toward social justice and prison abolition for several reasons. First, there is "the relationship between the detention processes and other forms of structural and cultural inequality affecting" racialized non-citizen and citizen communities alike (Hernandez, 2008, p. 41), such as policing (Parmar, 2020) and incarceration (Sudbury, 2005). The systemic racism of the criminal legal system has ever-expanding detention and deportation consequences (de Noronha, 2019), both as more and more criminal infractions render people deportable and as what Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2018) term everyday bordering functions to further marginalize and exclude racialized people. ...
This chapter examines how the lack of detailed, publicly available information about immigration detention – together with the opacity of the institutions and agencies responsible for detention in Canada – function as sources of social harm. The discussion is situated within the context of what we call a “crisis of transparency” in Canada in relation to accessing carceral sites of detention and information about them. We critically explore the possible role that greater transparency in information about detention and the institutions and agencies responsible for detention can play in reducing social harm and, ultimately, working towards its abolition. The chapter proceeds from the idea that without detailed, publicly available qualitative and quantitative data about immigration detention, it is more challenging to advocate for detained (and detainable) people and their families and communities, push for “evidence-based” policymaking, and argue towards the end of immigration detention. We consider the utility of access to information requests as a method of collecting data about immigration detention in Canada that also contributes to greater transparency and less institutional opacity as a means of reducing social harm. While acknowledging that increased transparency and institutional openness is not a panacea, we argue that it is an important part of humanising the lives lived in detention and making them grievable.
... In 2012, however, a new 'joint working operation' between the police and Home Office codenamed Operation Nexus was piloted in London, before being rolled-out nationally. The details vary by region, but typically include having immigration officials embedded at police stations, police officers checking people's immigration status, and police contact and intelligence used to build deportation cases (Griffiths, 2017;Parmar, 2019). ...
... The hostile environment clearly encompasses both classed and racialised biases, as is evident across the British immigration system (e.g. Bhui, 2016;Griffiths, 2017;Mayblin, 2017;Parmar, 2019;Sirriyeh, 2015); and reflects its origins in controlling the movement of racialised poor people from former colonies (El-Enany, 2020). ...
In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May told a newspaper that she wanted to create a ‘really hostile environment’ for irregular migrants in the UK. Although the phrase has since mutated to refer to generalised state-led marginalisation of immigrants, this article argues that the hostile environment is a specific policy approach, and one with profound significance for the UK’s border practices. We trace the ‘hostile environment’ phrase, exposing its origins in other policy realms, charting its evolution into immigration, identifying the key components and critically reviewing the corresponding legislation. The article analyses the impact and consequences of the hostile environment, appraising the costs to public health and safety, the public purse, individual vulnerability and marginalisation, and wider social relations. We conclude by identifying the fundamental flaws of the policy approach, arguing that they led to the 2018 Windrush scandal and risk creating similar problems for European Economic Area nationals after Brexit.
... Internasjonalt har det vaert relativt lite empirisk forskning på politiets migrasjonskontroll, men i løpet av de siste årene har interessen for denne forskningen vaert (noe) økende (se Aliverti, 2020;Franko, 2019;Gundhus & Franko, 2016;Gundhus & Jansen, 2020;Leun & Woude, 2011;Parmar, 2020;Weber, 2011Weber, , 2013. Her blir det blant annet pekt på hvordan politiets praksis preges av en selektiv kontroll av personer på grunnlag av personens bakgrunn, klasse og rase (Parmar, 2020), samt at skjønnsutøvelsen av politikontrollen synes å gi et stort handlingsrom (Gundhus, 2016;Sklansky, 2012;Aas, 2014). ...
... Internasjonalt har det vaert relativt lite empirisk forskning på politiets migrasjonskontroll, men i løpet av de siste årene har interessen for denne forskningen vaert (noe) økende (se Aliverti, 2020;Franko, 2019;Gundhus & Franko, 2016;Gundhus & Jansen, 2020;Leun & Woude, 2011;Parmar, 2020;Weber, 2011Weber, , 2013. Her blir det blant annet pekt på hvordan politiets praksis preges av en selektiv kontroll av personer på grunnlag av personens bakgrunn, klasse og rase (Parmar, 2020), samt at skjønnsutøvelsen av politikontrollen synes å gi et stort handlingsrom (Gundhus, 2016;Sklansky, 2012;Aas, 2014). Spesielt har Webers (2013) empiriske forskning på kontroll av ikke-borgere («non-citizens») i Australia vaert banebrytende for å forstå hvordan kontekstuelle, sosiopolitiske forhold har betydning for utforming av migrasjonskontroll. ...
Sammendrag
Migrasjonskontroll har i økende grad blitt del av hverdagen til
norsk politi. Observasjoner og intervjuer med polititjenestepersoner
i et politidistrikt viser at selv om oppdraget for utlendingskontrollen
var gitt, åpnet likevel rammevilkårene for forhandling, og at informantene
kunne følge sine egne motivasjoner. Et sentralt funn er at det tjenestepersoner omtaler
som «den gode fangen» har konsekvenser for hvem som identifiseres
som mistenkelige og velges ut for nærmere kontroll. Intervjuene
viser at «magefølelsen» ble brukt aktivt i arbeidet med å identifisere
«gode fanger», og tegn på kriminalitet. Magefølelsen og politiblikket
var rettet mot atferd, bekledning og rekvisitter, kjønn, og etnisitet/hudfarge.
Undersøkelsen viser at det å fange «gode fanger» med koblinger til
kriminalitet hadde en viktig funksjon, fordi det tillot informantene
å utøve jobben sin på en måte som i størst mulig grad ivaretok den
positive politiidentiteten, innenfor rammene av oppdraget de var
blitt gitt og målstyringens krav om høyt antall deporterte personer.
... In this regard, given that the services offered are those necessary for the continuation of life-ones taken for granted by residents of the place to which people migrate-migrants are pitied for their situation by residents, and donations to their cause are as a result of this pity (Lantos et al., 2020). Simultaneously, migrants are not trusted (Borrelli, 2022) to be satisfied with handouts and are viewed as likely to resort to anti-social activity (Parmar, 2020) to retain necessities. Specific social, economic, and political hierarchies and policies are recognized to produce and pattern poor health in migrants (Carruth et al., 2021). ...
Migrate as a verb represents a process where providing social services to migrants reduces their instability and discomfort with providers inclined to pity or fear migrants. Consequently, migrants learn to form negative views of themselves, decreasing their mental health. Considering migrate as a verb neglects the noun to whom or to which the migrant is heading—a person, place, thing, event, or idea. Viewing migration as noun-dependent, the migrant is potentially identifiable as self-directing their migration and seeking aid. This study examines examples of the five types of nouns migrants may conceptualize to guide their migration in a narrative review of Google Scholar search results of “[noun-type] to which [whom] migrants head in their migration” for each noun type regarding the four relevant highest returned post-2020 reports. Examining migrant mental health considers a 2023 systematic review regarding place. The purpose is to investigate the social services applicable to migrants if ultimately self-directing (or not) regarding coping theory, contrasting problem-focused with emotion-focused coping. Viewing such migration nouns as essential migration signifiers encourages migrants’ favorable identification. In recognizing the intended self-direction of the migrant, their mental health is improved and is supportable through relevant and appropriately available social services.
... There is no other public authority where this is more challenging than the police, whose duties place them in an impossible situation while carrying out their duties (Manning, 1990). Parmar (2020) has suggested that racial bias is a common phenomenon in police work across many nation-states, the reason for more intensive research on police and racial minority experiences and perceptions in countries, including Finland. In Finland, research suggests that minorities are vulnerable to racial profiling and stereotyping of their groups in the country (Keskinen et al. 2018). ...
Many research studies have premised that ethnicity or minority status is one of the most striking factors producing apprehension or dissatisfaction with the police. This paper discusses African and Asian migrants’ perceptions and anxieties about policing during the COVID-19 period in Finland. Migrants often bring unique perceptions and anxieties that contribute to their vulnerability within the broader society. The findings in this study indicate that most of the respondents are concerned about the police based on their anxieties or perceptions influence certain attitudes towards the police, whether negative or positive. This paper argues that minorities often marginalised in societal hierarchies, perceive bias in police attitudes and behaviours, which they view as reflective of the broader Finnish policing ideology.
... Through their presence and performance, police serve as a "vehicle" through which communities are imagined (Loader and Walker 2001), and citizenship is experienced and evaluated (Soss and Weaver 2017). Recently, scholars have been paying more attention to the impact of policing on citizenship (Lerman and Weaver 2014) and, more particularly, how the interactions between police and race define citizenship (Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel 2014;Parmar 2020). In our study, we suggest that the decrease in trust in the police among Ethiopian Israelis is not due to changes in police behavior towards them but rather to how Israelis of Ethiopian descent perceive their status within Israel's citizenship regime. ...
In this article, our focus is on examining intergenerational differences in attitudes toward the police among Jewish Israelis of Ethiopian descent. Our quantitative analysis compares the results from our previous survey conducted in 2013 to those of a more recent study in 2022. Our analysis revealed three primary findings:
1. Levels of trust in the police have significantly decreased among Ethiopian Israelis and the majority group (non-Haredi Jewish Israelis).
2. In 2022, Ethiopian Israelis had lower trust in the police compared to the majority group, whereas in 2013, it was the opposite.
3. Younger Ethiopian Israelis (aged 18-30) have lower trust in the police than older community members.
We used content analysis of media reports about Ethiopian-Israeli protesters to complement the quantitative analysis. According to our findings, the younger generation of Ethiopian Israelis believes that achieving full and meaningful citizenship will only be possible once institutional racism towards them by the police, as well as the state and society at large, has been eliminated. This is in contrast to the previous generations' expectation that their integration into Jewish society would reduce racialization and mistreatment by the police.
... En otros términos, cuando se cumplen (potencialmente) los requisitos de la expulsión, la policía recurre de manera creciente a intervenciones expeditivas en las que los supuestos infractores son derivados a las medidas de detención y deportación, marginando los procedimientos normales de persecución del delito. Como es evidente, este modelo de intervención facilita las tareas policiales y pretende dar una respuesta punitiva rápida a los casos de pequeña criminalidad urbana que implican a personas extranjeras (Aliverti 2020(Aliverti , 2021Parmar 2020). En consecuencia, en este caso la prioridad de los principios de eficiencia y de los intereses de control de fronteras sobre los fines de la justicia penal es particularmente evidente. ...
En marzo de 2024 se ha celebrado en Portland (EE. UU.) el quinto congreso global de estudios crimigratorios. A lo largo de los últimos tres lustros, la crimigración se ha convertido en una tesis fundamental para estudiar los procesos de criminalización de la movilidad irregular y, más en general, la creciente interrelación entre el derecho penal y el derecho migratorio. Este trabajo presenta las principales líneas de debate en torno a la tesis de la crimigración. Junto a ello, analiza un aspecto al que no se ha prestado suficiente atención por parte de la literatura internacional en la materia, a saber, la tensión entre los objetivos de control migratorio y los de control penal. Esa tensión, que se manifiesta tanto en el plano normativo como –más aún– en el de aplicación del derecho, ha dado lugar en diferentes países a diversos modelos punitivos, que en general suelen priorizar los intereses de control migratorio frente a los propios del derecho penal y del sistema penal.
... Research findings can doubt the credibility or veracity of the information provided in immigration claims or testimonies (Kahn & Fábos, 2017;Neylon, 2019). Second, related to legal precarity, migration is increasingly criminalized (Parmar, 2020;Ben-Arieh & Heins, 2021). As a result, migrants face heightened surveillance and scrutiny (Moffette & Aksin, 2018). ...
Fieldwork challenges involving hard-to-reach populations and with which many novice researchers grapple are apparent. However, literature on the issues related to female researchers’ experiences with hard-to-reach populations like undocumented foreign migrants is scarce. This article reflects on local female researchers’ fieldwork experiences during a study on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign migrants operating informal businesses in the downtown area of Bloemfontein, South Africa. Our findings highlight unique challenges confronted by local female researchers compared to their male counterparts, including the risk of physical and emotional harm. Despite these challenges, female researchers play a vital role in accessing and understanding hard-to-reach populations, contributing immensely to the fieldwork research process. We also recognize the influence of contextual factors, such as xenophobia, on fieldwork dynamics, emphasizing the need to consider broader socio-political factors during fieldwork. To foster more inclusive research practices, we advocate for the involvement of members from hard-to-reach populations as integral members of the research team, offering their invaluable insider perspectives, knowledge and cultural milieu. Looking ahead, we call for greater support for women in research, including gender-sensitive training, and increased awareness of gender-based risks during fieldwork.
... However, the scope of the racialisation processes operating in this sphere goes far beyond the Roma peo ple. Discrimination patterns affect wider Eastern European communities, showing that there are various shades of whiteness, as the critical literature has insightfully contended (Aliverti, 2018;Bhui, 2016;Parmar, 2020). In fact, there is no way to understand racialisation processes in EUrope without taking into account the piv otal part that varied Eastern European populations have long been playing in those processes (Fox, Moroşanu & Szilassy, 2012;Franko, 2020). ...
... In this article, we argue that Mexico's border practices maintain and reproduce longstanding racial and class discrimination against historically marginalised populations in Mexico. Thus, we examine migration control as a process that amplifies the exclusion and criminalisation of citizens who do not conform to the imagined 'we' of the nation and, thus, add to the growing border criminology literature on the politics and policing of belonging (Aliverti 2020;Parmar 2020a;Weber 2019). ...
On 3 September 2015, Mexican immigration authorities detained four Indigenous Tzeltal Mexicans who were travelling by bus to the northern state of Sonora. Despite identifying themselves as Mexican citizens, the authorities considered their documents false, and they were detained for nine days until their identities were certified. The Mexican State took four years to acknowledge publicly and apologise for this arbitrary detention. Similarly, in 2017, a 39‑year‑old man born in Oaxaca, living in the streets of Puebla after being deported by the United States Government, was detained for being ‘identified’ as a Salvadorian citizen by Mexican authorities. However, it would be a mistake to consider these cases an exception or anomaly in the Mexican Transit Control Regime. Drawing on statistical and archival information from 2010 to 2020, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021, in this article, we examine the arbitrary detention of Mexican citizens by Mexican immigration authorities. We highlight the multiple rights violated, question how these detentions have been framed in the official discourse and examine the outcome of these detentions. Our analysis sheds light on the racialisation of migration control in Mexico.
... Likewise, Fekete and Webber (2010) have argued that automatic deportation after a prison sentence, harsher sentences and resections to citizenship and permanent residence constitute a separate criminal justice system for foreign nationals. This underlining binary conception of members and non-members risks idealizing the criminal justice system, as if membership would guarantee equal treatment, despite extensive evidence of differential law enforcement practices and criminal adjudications based on racialized practices and perceptions of certain risk groups (Armenta, 2017;Fassin, 2013;Parmar, 2020). More importantly for the analysis of removal measures, such debates overlook the fact that immigration controls do not operate on the binary terms of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. ...
Notwithstanding claims about the emergence of 'crimmigration' systems, immigration law and criminal law entail two different sets of instruments for authorities to control foreign nationals. Drawing on an analysis of removal orders for foreign offenders in Finland, this article demonstrates that significant administrative powers in immigration enforcement are employed largely autonomously from the criminal justice system. Immigration law enables the police and immigration officials to issue removal orders based on fines or penal orders for (suspected) minor offences, without obtaining criminal convictions. In addition to disproportionate administrative sanctions for foreign nationals, removal orders involve a preventive rationale targeting future risks for the society based on the assumed continuation of criminal activities. While criminal courts adjudicate all severe offences, punitive application of immigration law enables authorities to bypass criminal justice procedures and safeguards, resulting in a distinct, administrative punitive system for visiting third-country nationals.
... However, as Balibar (2002: 84) has pointed out, the control of mobility has been detached from the territorial borders and takes place increasingly wherever and whenever people are obliged to prove their identity. In practice, controlling national entry bans is likely to be connected with identity verification in public and immigration services, crime control, (cr)immigration checks, and other internal border control measures involving racialised and gendered practices (Fabini 2019;Parmar 2020; van der Woude and van der Leun 2017). ...
Despite their prominent role in the Return Directive and the constitution of the common European border regime, entry bans and their role in the governance of unwanted mobility remain largely unexamined in migration research. Entry bans accompany removal decisions for non-compliant or criminalised non-citizens, applying by default in the whole Schengen area, excluding EU citizens and legally residing third-country nationals, who receive national bans. In this article, drawing from my research on the immigration detention system in Finland, I discuss how entry bans sanction and irregularise movement mainly inside Europe, complicate non-citizens' regularisation, and affect their mobility strategies. Despite also being intertwined with crime control in Finland, national entry bans seem largely ineffective in preventing unwanted mobility inside the Schengen area: many Estonian citizens, in particular, are detained and removed from Finland several times a year. Notwithstanding the Europe-wide effect intended in the Return Directive, national entry bans issued alongside Schengen bans reintroduce borders inside Europe. Furthermore, by prolonging the duration of removal orders for years, entry bans establish individual borders that may be faced in the future.
... Second, related to legal precarity, migration is increasingly criminalized (Stumpf 2006;García Hernández 2014;Atak and Simeon 2018;Menjívar, Cervantes and Alvord 2018;Parmar 2020;Ben-Arieh and Heins 2021). Moreover, research takes place in contexts of wide-ranging "anti-terrorist" 1 laws and national security legislation (Guild 2003;Huysmans and Buonfino 2008;Savun and Gineste 2019). ...
Migration research poses particular ethical challenges because of legal precarity, the criminalization and politicization of migration, and power asymmetries. This paper analyzes these challenges in relation to the ethical principles of voluntary, informed consent; protection of personal information; and minimizing harm. It shows how migration researchers — including those outside of academia — have attempted to address these ethical issues in their work, including through the recent adoption of a Code of Ethics by the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). However, gaps remain, particularly in relation to the intersection of procedural and relational ethics; specific ethical considerations of big data and macrocomparative analyses; localized meanings of ethics; and oversight of researchers collecting information outside of institutional ethics boards.
... Asian women are perceived as submissive and passive, while men from some African countries are regarded as riskier and threatening. Given the centrality of race and gender in everyday border work (Bosworth and Slade, 2014;Parmar, 2020), the relationship between violence and policing acquires a distinctive feature. Discretionary decisions on the use of force are hence shaped by stereotypes about dangerous and risky nationalities. ...
This article reassesses the relationship between state authority and violence in the context of border controls. Drawing on empirical research conducted with immigration and police officers in the UK, I show that the use of force in this context give rise to distinctively complex ethical questions which shape institutional and individual practices, and is entangled with the legally and politically fragile authority wielded by frontline staff. Faced with a morally, socially and politically controversial mandate, these officers devise a range of strategies to either minimize or conceal the use of violence. In doing so, they sometimes fall into oxymorons and euphemisms that at once evidence the shady line between coercion and consent, and shed light on the some of the profound moral dilemmas they encounter in doing border work. These dilemmas, I conclude, speak of broader challenges to the exercise of state coercive power, and the negotiated, contingent and provisional nature of state authority in a globalized, postcolonial and profoundly unequal world. I also argue for the social and intellectual urge to integrate the study of immigration enforcement in contemporary debates of state penality.
... For example, if a spate of criminal credit card activity was reported, the criminal investigation team would be directed to trawl intelligence from Nigeria, Romania and Lithuania, and, in turn, any suspects would be checked against the immigration database. Crime typologies have been shown to be racialised, seamlessly linking categories of crime with nationality (and, by proxy, race) (Parmar 2019a). In another situation, an Italian national male suspect's case was passed to immigration, and an immigration status check was not deemed necessary. ...
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.
... In this regard, the gendered consequences of bordered penality are an underexplored dimension of current border criminology debates (see though Dingeman et al. 2017;Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013;Hartry 2012;Matos 2016). By contrast, a burgeoning literature has scrutinised race and the racial stratifications underpinning, and being cemented by, recent immigration enforcement policies (see Bhui 2016;Bosworth, Parmar and Vázquez 2018;Isom Scott 2020;Parmar 2020). However, this race-based perspective needs to be further teased out through cross-national research. ...
Border criminology authors have recently called for an expansion of criminological conceptions on penal power to include migration law enforcement devices. An amplified analytical gaze on penality is critical to challenge mainstream notions of punitiveness—an academic effort that is particularly relevant because incarceration rates are declining in many Global North jurisdictions. This paper explores various implications of this border criminology contribution to academic debates on punitiveness by investigating the interrelation of incarceration rate changes with detention and deportation data. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning theoretical debate on the impact of immigration enforcement policies on current penal changes.
... 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.
... On the other hand, dominant perceptions on the criminality of the migrants and refugees (Unnever 2014) reinforce the linkage between migration and criminality as well as the interpretation of data derived either from research or statistics (Sohoni and Sohoni 2014). In addition, strategic policing to manage migration or racial profiling contributes the increase of number of migrants involved in criminal justice (Parmar 2019). In any case, criminal behavior for the part of migrants is not based on a simple comparison of the crimes committed by nationals and nonnationals (Feltes et al. 2018). ...
Getting the refugees and immigrants economically empowered and effectively integrated into societies is, though a formidable task, not an act of charity but an act of human justice. Refugees are confronted with multiple obstacles to finding and keeping decent productive empowerment and acceptance. With a low level of education, limited capabilities, and an insecure immigration status, they are often in a befogged state of affairs in the absence of guided directions and assistance to seize possible productive opportunities. The prevailing public services, workforce development, and education facilities often do not adequately respond to their needs, partly because of the challenges of legal status and of issues of cultural conflicts and a general lack of knowledge of emerging opportunities that can offer sustainable sources of livelihoods in terms of income and employment generation. With enhanced adaptive capabilities and skills to use modern technologies and devices and to commercialize new knowledge, refugees and immigrants can contribute to productive activities and productivity growth, as well as emerge as promising entrepreneurs. As evidenced by the country experiences furnished in the article, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) is at it through proper sensitization of pertinent issues and options and effective empowerment of refugees in its interventions within the framework of its mandate to foster inclusive sustainable industrial development.
In late 2021 Hodgkinson and colleagues presented several critiques of the centrality of race to the political underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The article proposed that the marginality of Black individuals was instead bound up with socioeconomic marginalisation. They included seemingly racialised inequities in the Criminal Justice System (CJS). The argument implicitly undermines the lived experiences of racialised minority groups and their concerns about race and criminal justice. It also suggests that racial inequalities are not substantive enough to be a central disciplinary theme in criminology. Hodgkinson et al’s argument conflates Black Lives Matter – a social movement – with Critical Race Theory (CRT) – an academic body of knowledge and theory. The article’s premise was a ‘critical assessment’ of BLM via the medium of critiquing CRT. However, the authors draw on a plethora of works, embodying a wide range of political positions on ‘race’, and assumed that they are works of CRT. This produced recurring straw premises. Because students and other readers unfamiliar with CRT might uncritically absorb the subtext of the article as representative of a consensus in the field of criminology, we felt it appropriate to provide a critical retort.
Whilst ‘the public’ is often assumed to mean ‘everybody’, those marginalised through immigration policies and border policing are more often treated as those who do not belong. It is from these populations that so-called victims of ‘modern slavery’ and ‘human trafficking’ (‘MSHT’) typically emerge. As a result, police officers concerned with protecting these people should focus first of all on the harms caused by the state itself. Only in this context can one understand the specific situations of abuse and exploitation that the ‘modern slavery’ paradigm alludes to, and why policing so often causes more harm than relief to the people involved. This chapter elaborates on this context and considers the contradictions involved in both the concept and policies of ‘MSHT’. Whilst those on the frontlines are frequently criticised for failing to successfully implement anti-slavery legislation, I argue that police officers are charged with satisfying irreconcilable political objectives. By discussing the contradictions and complexities of this often oversimplified topic, the chapter may offer some explanation for the experiential and emotional frustration officers face in this line of work. I finish by tentatively discussing possible paths of progress.
Au début des années 1980, les étranger·ère·s représentaient 30% des personnes détenues en Suisse. En 2020, ils et elles représentent plus de 70% d’entre elles. En 40 ans, le ratio entre nationaux·ales et étranger·ère·s dans les prisons suisses s’est littéralement inversé. À travers une analyse statistique des données pénales, cet article discute les causes de ce basculement et montre l’impact significatif de la criminalisation de l’immigration dite « indésirable » sur la composition de la population carcérale. Les résultats soutiennent l’idée que le contrôle de l’immigration est devenu l’une des fonctions majeures des prisons suisses et soulignent l’implicite racial qui sous-tend une telle politique de « crimmigration ».
Immigration control has been a central site of carceral expansion in the last few decades: operating as a frontier of criminalisation, control, capture, removal, profit, abandonment and punishment. Yet this is frequently obfuscated in dominant state discourses and narratives. This chapter, however, argues that Steven Box’s analysis in Power, Crime and Mystification provides vital conceptual tools which help understand its contours. While immigration control was not a feature of the book when it was published in 1983, what follows here argues that its analytical framework nonetheless aids the task of understanding the carceral logics inherent within immigration control, how these are mystified and ultimately challenging them.
Human smuggling crimes and facilitation criminal offences have been widely explored by legal scholars. The legal literature has insightfully pointed out the various shortcomings of the legal provisions criminalising facilitation activities, contrasting them with the principles of a rights-based model of criminal justice. Much less research has been conducted on the actual enforcement of these criminal law provisions on the ground. This research gap is especially noteworthy with regard to comparative studies. This chapter contributes to bridge that gap by considering the various pitfalls stemming from the implementation of anti-smuggling penal policies in a number of western European countries. In so doing, the chapter explores the relative insignificance of smuggling and facilitation crimes in various jurisdictions, as well as their uneasy coexistence with irregular migration criminal offences. In addition, the chapter spotlights the effectiveness dimension of these penal policies, scrutinising what the rare enforcement of smuggling and facilitation crimes tells us about the role played by the criminal justice system in the coercive management of irregular migration.
This chapter presents a subjective and personal overview of the literature produced on the links between immigration, crime, police and politics. Considering the international audience of the book, it draws attention on nodal points of research works produced from Argentina, as well as from other regions of the world (United Kingdom, Italy, France and United States, among others). One of the merits of this book is to gather background information on different dimensions (police and politics, police and migration, and immigration and crime) in one single place, when the most frequent is to find each of them developed separately. To order the reading, the chapter has subdivisions into three different headings: Relations between police and politics, Migrants and police practices and Immigration and crime. According to these sections, the plot thread will thus be the identification of different thematic cores or nodes.
This article illustrates how US Border Patrol agents and Dutch Military and Border Police officers explain racialized border control outcomes, through colourblind ideologies. These ideologies—legalism, criminalization and securitization—function as euphemisms that allow border agents to downplay the importance of immigrants’ race/ethnicity in their decision making and behaviour. Yet, underlying these colourblind ideologies are racialized immigration laws and social constructions that continue to produce group-based inequalities in who is questioned, arrested, detained and removed by border guards. We call for cross-national comparisons of how race/ethnicity is both manifested and concealed in border control. We also suggest the existence of supranational racial frames that protect the status quo in western immigration policies and practices.
The 2018 Windrush Scandal prompted widespread condemnation of the British government’s treatment of older Caribbean migrants. Yet broader questions pertaining to the effects of the scandal on the wider Caribbean community remain underexplored. Given the salient position that Caribbean mothers occupy in the British nation, this article examines narrative interviews with five Caribbean mothers living in London, addressing how the scandal affected their sense of belonging and subsequent mothering strategies. The findings indicate that the scandal is part of a broader repertoire of racialized exclusion instigated by the state, and identifies three mothering strategies deployed as tools of resistance.
Norway, England and Wales, and the USA are among a small number of affluent Western countries to establish ‘all-foreign’ prisons in response to public concerns about the growing threat of foreign-national prisoners. Drawing on collaborative analysis of empirical data collected at all-foreign prisons in these three countries, this article traces the conditions in which all-foreign prisons emerged, the position and function of all-foreign prisons in specific national systems of criminal justice and immigration control, and the operation of all-foreign prisons within each context. The article points to a shared logic, while drawing attention to the local expressions of bordered penality.
How are migrant communities policed in cities of the Global South where racially securitized discourses and colonial institutional legacies shape contemporary police practice? Critical criminologists advise that postcolonial perspectives offer valuable insights on imperial legacies, while allowing us to expand conceptual and empirical analyses of crime, policing, justice, and social order. Building on this agenda, this paper explores the intersection of postcolonial policing and immigration enforcement in the context of urban encounters between police officers and Afghan and Bengali migrants in urban Pakistan. It considers how the securitization of migration and migrants impacts their routine interactions with street-level enforcement officers. Based on ethnographic findings from Karachi, this paper argues that migrant encounters with urban policing can be captured by what I call the “postcolonial condition of policing” wherein prejudiced security policies enable expansions in police power without addressing structural inequalities within the police, facilitating reliance upon informal procedures and practices.
Records kept by security authorities documenting potentially violent encounters are generally characterized by technocratic language and parsimonious content, which is intended to project an image of objective and impartial state officials. A qualitative analysis of 688 records covering interrogations of suspects in terror activities by the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) presents a very different picture. They consist of representations of (1) hospitality—caring for the well-being of the person under interrogation; (2) camaraderie—amicable conversations between interrogator and interrogee; and (3) moral conviction—impassioned political or moral debates regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The analysis shows how unconventional documentation techniques in security interrogations may be used to preserve legitimacy; bolster professional prestige and makes a sophisticated use of a sense of secrecy.
Due to hyper-imprisonment and its collateral consequences, the United States has become a carceral state where even non-criminal justice institutions have adopted punitive techniques to address social problems. This study examines how state and non-state actors who ostensibly intend to end homelessness perpetuate it through their use of coercive benevolent policing. Drawing on nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork with a homeless service provider in Southern Nevada, this article shows that the coercive benevolent techniques used by those who attempt to assist the unhoused are deeply rooted in antiblack and colonial practices forged in the development of liberalism. I offer carceral liberalism as the conceptual link between contemporary U.S. policing and a transnational and historical past dedicated to racialized economic domination. I argue that carceral liberalism reveals the long and ongoing history of state and non-state actors marking marginalized individuals as non-subjects to the state through coercive benevolence and that these findings make a case for the abolition of larger systems of racialized punishment.
Using an interdisciplinary approach of critical historical and border criminology, this paper sheds light on the continuity and durability of the violent gendered-racialised border regime impacting ‘undesirable migrants’. With a focus on Britain and Australia, this article argues that border policies and practices have been constructed and maintained since the nineteenth century to the present day (continuity) and able to withstand various pressures for change (durability). The importance of controlling and monitoring ‘un/desirability’ in this way must be understood in the socio-political and temporal context of twentieth-century nation-state design, which entrenches these border mechanisms within a ‘white patriarchal possession logic’, therefore ensuring their durability. The concept of ‘un/desirability’, as this article demonstrates, is an adaptable tool that enables transformative coloniality and is currently actualised through the narrative of a ‘humanitarian border’. This article achieves these aims by presenting multiple historical and contemporary examples. These cases, when read in isolation from each other, do not offer a comprehensive and longitudinal view of the border regime over time. However, when these examples are considered together, they provide evidence of the continuity and durability of the border.
This chapter examines key theoretical positions employed in the examination of asylum seekers’ exceptional treatment by the state. It begins with the ‘crimmigration’ narrative advanced by Stumpf and expanded and adapted by others as a way of highlighting the convergence of crime control tactics, institutions and attitudes within immigration control practices. The second half of this chapter questions the appropriateness of adopting Giorgio Agamben’s interpretations of concepts like ‘bare life’ and ‘homo sacer’ in the study of the state’s role in victimising asylum seekers and other migrants through sovereign mechanisms of control and in using the law as a way of circumventing humanitarian responsibilities. Returning to Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’, this chapter ends with an argument that Foucault’s articulation of power as diffuse and the state’s aim to ‘protect’ society—often at the expense of others allowed to wither and die—offers a much more promising theoretical approach, as it allows for the possibility of agency and resistance within highly controlled environments.
This paper presents findings of a comparative study carried out in Poland and the Czech Republic, which analysed the societal attitudes towards migration and migrants in Europe. Our research shows that the reaction to migration in Poland and the Czech Republic constitutes a reversed (bottom up) securitisation. Moreover, contrary to the majority of security challenges where the immediate threats are understood to be more dangerous than those placed in a distant future, when it comes to securitised migration, the threat projection increases the further into the future it is cast, and immediacy loses its potency as a catalyst. This counter-intuitive securitisation of the future is extremely peculiar rendering migration very interesting if not unique in this regard.
The crimmigration literature has underlined the increasing merging of criminal law and immigration law practices and procedures. Border criminology literature, in turn, has recently scrutinized the penal scenario in which this alleged fusion is taking place. Both pieces of scholarship, though, largely overlook the agonistic coexistence of border control interests and crime prevention aims, as well as the preference given to immigration enforcement arrangements over criminal law procedures in many jurisdictions. By drawing on a number of cases mainly—albeit not exclusively—taken from Spanish crimmigration policies, this article examines what may be called the ‘instrumentalism’ strategies that are notably transforming crime control practices targeting noncitizens, and the criminal justice system in its entirety.
Migration and integration though are central issues in public debate, internationally and in Europe, little attention has been given to their relation with crime prevention. This chapter tries to stress this interdependance by exploring the ways under which criminal violence, either from the part of victimization or from the part of criminal behavior, in conjunction with the characteristic of the migrant/refugee population as well as the circumstances they live in, can be prevented.
This article examines how Venezuelan forced migrants in Peru experience xenophobic discrimination, which has become increasingly linked to their criminalisation as thieves and murderers. Based on 12 months of qualitative fieldwork, including 72 in-depth interviews, five focus groups, and a survey (N116) in five Peruvian cities, we explore how Venezuelans experience, and make sense of, discrimination and criminalisation in everyday life. First, we discuss how criminalisation compares to general xenophobic discrimination, and other types of discrimination experiences. Second, we juxtapose the prevalence of xenophobic discrimination and criminalisation experiences across the five cities of our study, and between public spaces and the workspace. We then move to the qualitative discussion of the criminalisation experience in these different spaces. Fourth, we discuss how Venezuelan migrants perceive this criminalising discrimination as linked to their villanisation in the media and political discourses. Finally, we discuss our findings and make suggestion for further research. The paper contributes to the literature on migrant criminalisation by exploring how criminalisation processes play out in the context of large-scale intraregional forced displacement in the global South.
This article questions multiculturalism’s reliance on citizenship as a default condition of inclusion. While agreeing with multiculturalists that there are groups within the citizenry who are excluded from citizenship rights on the basis of their cultural background, this article highlights the misrecognition of non-citizens that is yet unaccounted for by Anglophone theories of multiculturalism where eligibility to multicultural rights-claiming hinges on the condition of formal citizenship. The status of non-citizenship affects conceptions of ‘difference’ where representations of cultural ‘otherness’ are compounded by the ‘foreignness’ of non-citizens. Frameworks of multicultural citizenship entail recognition through group-specific rights, but only for citizens, in so doing excluding the needs and rights of non-citizens. The assumption made by multiculturalists is that citizenship is a condition of multicultural rights and/or recognition despite scenarios where non-citizens may not desire the citizenship of their host country, or the idea of ‘belonging’ it is attached to. Appealing to multiculturalist principles and the neo-republican notion of non-domination, I argue that multiculturalism as a theory can challenge the limitations of citizenship by expanding its compass to include non-citizens as multicultural subjects.
This article considers the role of temporality in the differential inclusion of migrants. In order to do this we draw on research which examined the working lives of a diverse group of new migrants in North East England: Eastern European migrants arriving from 2004 and asylum seekers and refugees arriving from 1999. In so doing we emphasize both distinct and shared experiences, related to immigration status but also a range of other dimensions of identity. We specifically consider how dominant temporalities regulate the lives of new migrants through degrees, periods and moments of acceleration/deceleration. The paper illustrates the ways in which dominant temporalities control access and non-access to particular, often precarious forms of work – but also how migrants attempt to navigate such restrictions through their own use and constructions of time. We explore this in relation to three ‘phases’ of time. Firstly, through experiences of the UK asylum system and work prohibition. Secondly, for a broader group of participants we explore the speeding up and slowing down of transitions to and progression within work. Lastly, we consider how participants experience everyday temporal tensions between paid employment and unpaid care. Across these phases, we suggest that dominant orderings of time and the narratives which make sense of these represent non-simultaneous temporalities that do not neatly map onto each other.
With the intensifying securitization of Western borders in the global War on Terror citizenship rights are increasingly fragile. Measures introduced by the British government to deal with the terrorist threat at home include citizenship deprivation, temporary exclusion orders as well as passport removals. Whilst citizenship deprivation has provoked critique for its potential violations of international human rights conventions on statelessness, cancellations of passports have not been subjected to the same kind of critique. Drawing on recent debates and interview data we demonstrate the alignment of citizenship deprivation and passport removals and conclude that these measures serve the same goal: of unmaking citizens. In this paper, we discuss findings from novel empirical research with individuals who have been removed of their British passports to illuminate the racialized dynamics of this process and the reconfiguration of racial governmentalities.
This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis within which Brexit occurred with a specific attentiveness to race and racism. Brexit and its aftermath have been overdetermined by racism, including racist violence. We suggest that the Leave campaign secured its victory by bringing together two contradictory but inter-locking visions. The first comprises an imperial longing to restore Britain’s place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist subjugation. The second takes the form of an insular, Powellite narrative of island retreat from a “globalizing” world, one that is no longer recognizably “British”. Further, the article argues that an invisible driver of the Brexit vote and its racist aftermath has been a politicization of Englishness. We conclude by outlining some resources of hope that could potentially help to negotiate the current emergency.
Police custody is a complex environment, where police officers, detainees and other staff interact in a number of different emotional, spatial and transformative ways. Utilising ethnographic and interview data collected as part of a five-year study which aims to rigorously examine 'good' police custody, this paper analyses the ways that liminality and temporality impact on emotion in police custody. Architecture has previously been noted as an important consideration in relation to social control, with literature linking the built environment with people's emotional 'readings' of space. No work, however, has examined the links between temporality, liminality and emotional performativity in a police custody context. In this environment, power dynamics are linked to past experiences of the police, with emotions being intrinsically embodied, relational, liminal and temporal. Emotion management is therefore an important way of conceptualising the dynamic relationships in custody. The paper concludes by arguing that emotional aftershocks symbolise the liminal experience of detainees' understanding of the police custody process once released, noting that it is important to understand the microscale, lived experience of police custody in order to develop broader understanding of broader social and policing policy in a police custody context.
An association of strangers with danger and criminality is one of the most enduring social myths. However, in the UK, it was only after a media outcry 10 years ago over the release of foreign nationals from British prisons, that the ‘Foreign Criminal’ exploded into political and popular consciousness. Despite the small numbers of people involved, the location of this folk devil at the intersection of legal and moral assessments of ‘wickedness’ and alterity imbues it with considerable potency and has ensured that its reverberations are still felt strongly a decade later. Drawing on qualitative research with immigration detainees, deportees and irregular migrants, the article considers some of the many faces of the Foreign Criminal and illuminates their racialised, classed and gendered natures. It argues that a twin set of developments – coalescing around Operation Nexus and curtailed Article 8 right protections – work together to taint a growing number of non-citizens with criminality, whilst simultaneously undermining their claim to belong. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the fault lines of this malleable and expanding category, and to argue that the Foreign Criminal is paradigmatic of both social disorder and national boundaries, and is fundamentally shifting the lines of citizenship and belonging.
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next.
The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. This book presents their findings, and provides insights into the practice of conducting research on such a charged and sensitive topic.
The e-book is online! http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=625583
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http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526113221/
With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other "disorderly" people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and public safety, many cities have wholeheartedly embraced "zero-tolerance" or "broken window" policing efforts to clear the streets of unwanted people. Through an almost completely unnoticed set of practices, these people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return-effectively banished from public places. This book offers an exploration of these new tactics that dramatically enhance the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, the chapters chart the rise of banishment in Seattle, a city on the leading edge of this emerging trend, to establish how it works and explore its ramifications. They demonstrate that, although the practice allows police and public officials to appear responsive to concerns about urban disorder, it is a highly questionable policy-it is expensive, does not reduce crime, and does not address the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Moreover, interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives and their path to self-sufficiency immeasurably more difficult. At a time when ever more cities and governments in the U.S. and Europe resort to the criminal justice system to solve complex social problems, the book provides a challenge to exclusionary strategies that diminish the life circumstances and the rights of those it targets.
The modern democratic state interacts with citizens through various paths, but at least two are central: public school systems and criminal justice systems. Rarely are criminal justice systems thought to serve the educational function that public school systems are specifically designed to provide. Yet for increasing numbers of Americans, the criminal justice system plays a powerful and pervasive role in providing a formal civic education that mirrors, in the reverse, the education that public schools are supposed to offer. Deploying educational curriculum theory, we analyze three of the primary processes of criminal justice systems — adjudication, incarceration, and policing — to demonstrate the operation of two parallel curricula: a symbolic, overt curriculum rooted in positive civic conceptions of fairness and democracy, and a hidden curriculum, rooted in empty or negative conceptions of certain citizens and their relationship to the state. We conclude with a few observations and recommendations that grow out of seeing the criminal justice system as a source of civic education.
For most of the 19th century, race theory and its scientific study—known as ethnology—were regarded as key tools for unlocking the secrets of human history and explaining social and biological differences among human beings. In this article the influence of race and ethnology in the development of ideas about native criminals in colonial British India is examined. The article situates discourses about crime and criminality within a wider set of deliberations that sought to know and categorize the peoples and cultures of India. The production of heuristic tools—like the concept of caste—allowed this `primitive' and `backward' society to be ordered for both scholarly and administrative inquiry. It was out of such ideas that the notion of hereditary criminal tribes was born and special legislative measures to categorize and control `suspect' native communities were justified. The nexus between criminalization and mercantilist priorities to encourage settled agricultural production and suppress traditional economic activities finds expression in Act XXVII of 1871, the Criminal Tribes Act.
The merger between familiar modes of policing with the impetus for migration control is reorganizing the racial politics of policing in unexpected ways. In the aim to decipher who is a citizen, who is a foreign national offender and who is eligible for deportation on the grounds of criminality, the role of criminal records agencies has expanded further into the work of policing, as have the collaborative working partnerships between immigration and the police. In this article, I discuss the findings from research, which examines the policing of migration in the United Kingdom, and specifically Operation Nexus, which brings together ordinary police work and migration control. I focus on how technologies of border control are imbricated with everyday police practices that are often influenced by race, thereby deepening the reach of racial technologies and their capacity to monitor and exclude racial others.
Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ʼnational origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primacy of purported security concerns over the equal protection concerns raised by racial profiling in routine immigration enforcement activities. This, in turn, promotes racially motivated policing practices, reifying both racial distinctions and racial discrimination. Drawing on textual analysis of judicial decisions as well as on interviews with immigrants and immigrant justice organization staff in California, this chapter illustrates how courts contribute to racialized immigration enforcement practices, and explores how those practices affect individual immigrants’ articulation of racial identity and their perceptions of race and racial hierarchy in their communities.
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.
This article examines institutional practices designed to control criminalized migrants in the UK and advances three arguments. First, these practices have evolved, since the early 1970s, into a bespoke ‘crimmigration control system’ distinct from the domestic criminal justice system. Second, this system is directed exclusively at efficient exclusion and control; through a process of adiaphorization, moral objections to the creation of a ‘really hostile environment’ have been disabled. Third, the pursuit of the criminalized immigrant—a globally recognized ‘folk devil’—provides a vital link between domestic and global systems of policing, punishment and exclusion. The UK crimmigration control system is an example of wider processes that are taking place in institutions concerned with the control of suspect populations across the globe.
Race and Ethnic Studies/Sociology/Critical Race Theory
'Stop and search' is a form of police-citizen interaction that is confrontational, often stressful for those involved, and potentially damaging to the relationship between police and public. The extent to which police officers use their power to stop and perhaps search members of the public is intimately linked not only to the present-day context of policing but also to longer term patterns in the aims of policing, the ends used to achieve them, and ultimately to the ideology of policing in England and Wales. Stop and Search and Police Legitimacy draws upon both police-administrative and survey-based data to examine what has for many years been one of the most highly charged and contested aspects of police practice. Taking a decidedly quantitative, empirical, approach, this book examines the patterning of police stops over social and geographic space, the problem of ethnic disproportionality, and the evidence concerning how people experience and react to being stopped by police - particularly in relation to issues of fairness, legitimacy, cooperation and compliance. A further important concern is the extent to which this form of police practice shapes and re-shapes the identities of those affected by it. This ground-breaking study is a comprehensive resource for students and scholars in the fields of criminology, sociology, social policy, ethnic and racial studies and human rights. It will also be of special interest to police leaders and policy-makers.
The article argues that everyday bordering has become a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity, in a way that threatens the convivial co-existence of pluralist societies, especially in metropolitan cities, as well as reconstructs everyday citizenship. The article begins with an outline of a theoretical and methodological framework, which explores bordering, the politics of belonging and a situated intersectional perspective for the study of the everyday. It then analyses the shift in focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border to the internal border, incorporating technologies of everyday bordering in which ordinary citizens are demanded to become either border-guards and/or suspected illegitimate border crossers. We illustrate our argument in the area of employment examining the impact of the requirements of the immigration legislation from the situated gazes of professional border officers, employers and employees in their bordering encounters.
This book provides an account of the distinctive way in which penal power developed outside the metropolitan centre. Proposing a radical revision of the Foucauldian thesis that criminological knowledge emerged in the service of a new form of power - discipline - that had inserted itself into the very centre of punishment, it argues that Foucault’s alignment of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power will need to be reread and rebalanced to account for its operation in the colonial sphere. In particular it proposes that colonial penal power in India is best understood as a central element of a liberal colonial governmentality.
Racism has always been “more than prejudice,” but mainstream social analysts have mostly framed race matters as organized by the logic of prejudice. In this paper, I do four things. First, I restate my criticism of the dominant approach to race matters and emphasize the need to ground our racial analysis materially, that is, understanding that racism is systemic and rooted in differences in power between the races. Second, I reflect critically on my own theorization on race (the racialized social system approach) and acknowledge that I should have explained better the role of culture and ideology in the making and remaking of race. Third, I describe some of the work I have done since this early work. Fourth, I advance several new directions for research and theory in the field of race stratification.
This article aims to introduce an in-depth conversation between International Relations (IR) and criminology about security practices and security studies. Too often each discipline has ignored the possibility of a dialogue, or has just borrowed ideas from the other discipline, unreflexively. This has created even more difficulties. But, it is possible to decolonize the topic of security from these traditional approaches, by connecting critical approaches on both side as they share an episteme based on an understanding of the practices of (in)security and the experiences lived by human beings. This is particularly the case of the convergence between the PARIS school of liberty and security analysing (in)security practices and critical criminologists interested in ‘everyday practices of security’, once they realize on both side that the internal and external security dimensions they study, are neither two different phenomena, nor the very same one, fusional and globalized at the same moment, but a set of differentiated practices that are nevertheless connected along a Mobius strip.
Criminologists are increasingly turning their attention to the many points of intersection between immigration and crime control. This book discusses the detection of unlawful non-citizens as a distinct form of policing which is impacting on a growing range of agencies and sections of society. It constitutes an important contribution not only to the literature on policing but also to the field of border control studies within criminology. Drawing on the work of Clifford Shearing, Ian Loader and P.A.J. Waddington, it offers new theoretical approaches to the study of police powers and practice.
This book seeks to address the pathologies and possibilities that attend the cultural connection between police, state, and nation. The goal is to assess the cultural and political significance of English policing, and its place within contemporary English social relations and public life. Drawing upon a two-year study of a range of police documentary materials, and biographical and oral history interviews with various strata of the populace, senior and rank-and-file police officers, and politicians and civil servants, it constructs a cultural sociology of the meanings attached to the idea of policing within English memory and sensibility - one oriented to the ways in which policing has intersected with forms of social and political change in English society since 1945. The book is organized into four parts. Part I offers an exposition and critique and what has become an influential sociological account of citizens' apparent loss of faith in the English police since 1945, referred to as the 'desacralization thesis'. Part II is concerned principally with the narratives that constitute lay dispositions towards English policing. Part III focuses on official (i.e., police and governmental) narratives. Part IV draws the threads of the enquiry together and offers an assessment of the current condition of English policing culture.
The article critically examines the peculiar co-existence of the securitization of the border and the growing presence and
prominence of human rights and humanitarian ideals in border policing practices. Concretely, it focuses on Frontex, the agency
tasked with management of EU’s external borders. Based on interviews with Frontex officials and border guard officers, and
on the analysis of relevant policy documents and official reports, the article explores what may come across as a discrepancy
between the organization’s activities and its public self-presentation. The objective is to provide an insight into the complex
and volatile relationship between policing and human rights, which marks contemporary migration control as well as mundane
forms of professional and personal self-understanding.
Throughout the world, resources are being shifted towards border enforcement. Along with the concerted political and financial investment afforded by states into defending territories, the apparatus of border policing comprises of numerous state agencies and an ever-expanding range of private actors and commercial bodies. Yet an examination of the culture and practices of those responsible for the routine preservation of border priorities has garnered surprisingly little attention within the sociology of policing. In this research note, I foreground an agenda intended to extend current research and reflection on the everyday policing and surveillance of borders. My starting point is that the policing of borders is undergoing significant changes but without the accompanying scrutiny by policing scholars. Drawing on examples from the USA and Europe, my overarching claim is that as policing and security governance on the border becomes more innovative and pluralistic, policing scholars need to engage in sustained ethnographic fieldwork to track how security frameworks are realised at the local level and acted out against national environments. In so doing, policing scholarship can lead the way in developing a more holistic understanding of border practices with a view to redressing the social injustice experienced by those at the receiving end of contemporary border regimes.
As border policing is no longer circumscribed to external borders and increasingly performed inland, in Britain migration
work relies on the assistance of a range of unorthodox partners, including the public. The unearthing of the ‘community’ as
a crucial partner to police a myriad of public safety issues, including migration, begs the question of what are the implications
of mobilizing citizenship for law enforcement? This paper argues that enlisting the public in migration law enforcement yields
important civic by-products: it ‘creates’ citizens and citizenship. It imparts civic training by instilling a sense of civic
responsibility in law and order maintenance, and in doing so it intends to recreate social cohesion across a deeply fragmented
society.
From the 1880s, states and self-governing colonies in North and South America, across Australasia, and in southern Africa began introducing laws to regulate the entry of newly defined “undesirable immigrants.” This was a trend that intensified exclusionary powers originally passed in the 1850s to regulate Chinese migration, initially in the context of the gold rushes in California and the self-governing colony of Victoria in Australia. The entry and movement of other populations also began to be regulated toward the end of the century, in particular the increasing number of certain Europeans migrating to the United States. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Britain followed this legal trend with the introduction of the 1905 Aliens Act, although it was a latecomer when situated in the global context, and certainly within the context of its own Empire. The Aliens Act was passed in response to the persecution of Eastern European Jews and their forced migration, mainly from the Russian Empire into Britain. It defined for the first time in British law the notion of the “undesirable immigrant,” criteria to exclude would-be immigrants, and exemptions from those exclusions. The Aliens Act has been analyzed by historians and legal scholars as an aspect of the history of British immigration law on the one hand, and of British Jewry and British anti-Semitism on the other. Exclusion based on ethnic and religious grounds has dominated both analyses. Thus, the Act has been framed as the major antecedent to Britain's more substantial and enduring legislative moves in the 1960s to restrict entry, regulate borders, and nominate and identify “undesirable” entrants effectively (if not explicitly) on racial grounds.
The article draws on perceptions of those working in professional capacities with European migrants in one area of the UK, to explore understandings about the relationship between European migrants and crime at the local level. The qualitative study informing the article involved semi-structured interviews with representatives from the criminal justice system (CJS) and community representatives. A key finding of the study was that both CJS and community representative respondent accounts were largely congruent. European migrants were more likely, in respondent accounts, to be victims, rather than perpetrators, of crime. Much of the predominantly ‘low-level’ crime associated with European migrant offending was reported to be largely a function of cultural difference and based on misunderstanding of UK law and CJS processes. The article concludes with some implications for the enculturalization and education of new migrants and the fostering of better understanding between European migrants and CJS agents and processes.
Australian state police have historically held wide-ranging powers which reflect their origins as all-encompassing administrators and agents of control over unruly colonial subjects. Contemporary police powers to stop and question individuals to establish whether they are lawfully present stem from at least 1958 when they were incorporated into section 188 of the Migration Act. There is no official monitoring of the use of stop and search powers in this or any other context, and the capacity for police to make on-the-spot checks has been enhanced by the establishment of the Immigration Status System which provides immediate feedback about immigration status, 24 hours a day. This paper will draw on statistical data, survey responses and interviews with senior New South Wales police to build up a picture of their immigration status checking practices, concentrating on opportunistic street encounters. The reported starting point – of directing attention to those who are perceived to be ‘out of place’ – embeds street-level border control into everyday practices of order maintenance policing. Questions of immigration status are found to be closely intertwined with determinations of identity, highlighting the importance in a globalising world of marking non-citizens as ‘surveillable subjects’, and raising deeper questions about entitlement and belonging.
The article discusses the effects that the debate about the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ is having on the regulation, scrutiny and the surveillance of migrant communities. Through the story of a young migrant it explores the ways that old hierarchies of belonging are taking new forms within the social landscape of contemporary London. This biographical case study is drawn from a larger qualitative study of 30 young adult migrants. Although the article focuses on a single case, its arguments are informed by the larger sample. The article argues that the debate about population mobility needs to transcend the ‘migrancy problematic’ and identify how the ordering of humanity works in a globalized and neo-liberal context. Combining insights from Stuart Hall’s recent writings and Franz Fanon’s lesser-known essays, the article argues that new hierarchies of belonging are established that replay aspects of colonial racism but in a form suited to London’s postcolonial situation.
It required more than three decades for fingerprint technology, invented in the British colony of India, to reach the British colony of Malta. Fingerprint technology was not institutionalized in Malta until 1932 owing to a different social context; British colonial authorities tended to see the Maltese as Europeans and never regarded crime prevention as a priority. Nevertheless, a review of policing in Malta in the 19th and early 20th centuries supports the thesis that fingerprint-based identification was invented to maintain surveillance over `otherness'. Although the colonial situation in Malta did not produce anything like the Criminal Tribes Act in British India, the introduction of fingerprint technology coincided with concern over foreign residents. Fingerprint technology became institutionalized following enactment of the Aliens Act in 1899 and formation of a detective and alien branch within the police organization. The diffusion of knowledge within the British Empire did not operate in a predictable direction. Rather, knowledge arising in one colony spread to others, as well as to England, channelled by familiar prejudices as much as scientific discovery.
On 1 November 2008, the Institute of Race Relations held a conference, 'Catching history on the wing', at the National Union of Teachers building in London, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its formation. We publish here the text of A. Sivanandan's speech to the conference, reflecting on the lessons of the Institute's history for today's political struggles.
Criminologists are increasingly pointing to new forms of control that are associated with the regulatory-yet-punitive states of late modernity. This article starts from the premise that the policing of global population movements is an example of an emerging punitive regulatory system that demands urgent attention by criminologists. It articulates an agenda for the critical examination of "migration policing" in Britain set against the backdrop of the historical inclusion and exclusion of immigrant groups, and proposes a "sites of enforcement" framework that is intended to guide further empirical investigations into the operation of immigration control networks.
This article explores the experiences of foreign national prisoners both before and after April 2006, when it was discovered that over 1000 had been released without first being considered for deportation by the Immigration and Nationality Department (IND).² It is argued that negative representations of this group of prisoners have exaggerated the threat they pose to society, masked their individuality and encouraged unequal treatment within the prison and immigration systems. The article draws largely on interviews conducted during two major investigations by HM Inspectorate of Prisons.³ A central consideration of the article is the impact of immigration problems on other issues such as resettlement, rates of self-harm and the experience of prisoners’ families.
This paper explores the advancement of racial neoliberalism in Britain, and notes the genealogy of the evaporation of race post-Macpherson to demonstrate that, while the terms of race are increasingly erased from public and institutional discourse, the institutionalization of racism continues unbounded, legitimated through the ‘War on Terror’. This dichotomy comes together under the ‘Prevent’ agenda which, as it maps onto ‘Community Cohesion’, has become the dominant thread of state policy on race. Thus, while any progressive measures using race for the purposes of anti-racism fade from view, they are increasingly overshadowed by a position which uses race, silently and ambiguously, through policies of policing and securitization. Consequently we move towards a place where the only mode in which race is spoken by the state is for the purposes of discipline and control.