Inside Immigration Detention
... One legitimation challenge presented by Canadian immigration law and policy, then, is that of staving off potential backlash to large-scale economic admissions-a backlash that might manifest as xenophobic or racist, but might also express a desire to preserve solidarity. At the same time, enforcement mechanisms that seemingly respond to backlash worries give rise to their own legitimation concerns, oriented toward both citizens and noncitizens, owing to the significant hardships that attend deportability (De Genova 2002; Sigona 2012; Benslimane and Moffette 2019), detention (Pratt 2005;Bosworth 2014), and deportation (Kanstroom 2012;Golash-Boza 2015). More pointedly, the imposition of these hardships seems to track distinctions of race (forty-eight out of fifty-two appellants in our sample, or 92%, were nationals of non-White majority countries), class (thirty-five of fifty-two appellants, or 67%, were either unemployed or working in unskilled jobs), and gender (forty-six of fifty-two appellants, or 88.5%, were men). ...
This article presents a sociolegal study of decisions by a Canadian immigration tribunal on appeals for "humanitarian and compassionate" relief from criminal deportation. Drawing on the work of Émile Durkheim, we argue that the appeal decisions serve two legitimating functions. On the one hand, they seek to demonstrate the state's capacity to ensure that the large-scale admission of mostly economic immigrants does not threaten the solidarity of Canadian society. On the other, the decisions address concerns about the justifiability of deportation by making vivid the moral incompetence of unsuccessful appellants, hence their unsuitability for membership. Résumé Cet article présente une étude sociojuridique des décisions prises par un tribunal canadien d'immigration en appel de décisions pour « motifs d'ordre humanitaire » suivant une mesure de renvoi fondé sur une déclaration de culpabilité au Canada. Sur la base des travaux d'Émile Durkheim, nous soutenons que ces décisions en appel remplissent deux fonctions de légitimation. D'une part, ces décisions tentent de faire la démonstration de la capacité de l'État à veiller à ce que l'admission à grande échelle d'immigrants, principa-lement des immigrants économiques, ne menace pas la solidarité de la société canadienne. D'autre part, ces décisions répondent aux préoccupations concernant la justification de la mesure de renvoi en mettant en évidence l'incompétence morale des requérants déboutés et donc leur inaptitude à devenir membres de la société canadienne.
... It usually takes some time to agree, ensuring that only those with secure academic posts may be able to afford to work on such sites and practices. In 2014, Mary Bosworth reported that her two-year research project into sites of UK immigration detention had taken 12 months to arrange (Bosworth, 2014). Ten years later, in a follow-up study of short-term immigration detention and deportation, matters had worsened; that project took over 24 months to set up (Bosworth, 2024). ...
... Among these, 2914 received a positive reasonable grounds decision and 194 received a positive conclusive grounds decision (After Exploitation and Women for Refugee Women (2020). Several studies have reported the effect that detention produces for migrant people in terms of trauma, extreme uncertainty, and long-term psychological repercussions (see for instance Bosworth, 2014). ...
... Since 9/11, governments in the Global North have prioritised immigration detention to demonstrate that they have control of the borders (Bosworth, 2014). It is a policy that " [...] has emerged as a crucial element of the search for a robust and credible system" (Hall, 2010, p. 882). ...
In immigration detention centres, emotions run high; tensions, conflicts, anxiety, and affection occur amid bureaucratic procedures, paperwork, files, lists of people, systematisation of cases, buses that come and go with detainees, and people who will be deported. Although immigration detention belongs to administrative law, in practice, detention centres operate closer to penal detention. Little is known about the operation of these places in Mexico, including how punishment takes place in daily practice. Even less is known about the people who work there, especially the rationale and emotions behind their daily decisions and the different ways in which they collaborate with a system that promotes punishment as a central element of immigration detention. In this article, I study how fear and disgust are emotions embedded in institutional practices that reinforce punishment in immigration detention, while empathy can challenge it. I analyse working conditions and daily interactions in detention centres, immigration control facilities and their surroundings. I argue that immigration agents can develop punitive subjectivities to channel emotions derived from anxieties and frustrations of daily work, as well as to embrace a sense of institutional belonging and the illusion of order and control. However, border officers also show empathy towards migrants to cope with emotional distress and humanise their daily work. I intend to answer the questions in this paper: Under what institutional conditions do emotions become power in immigration detention settings? What do emotions reveal about the functioning of punishment in immigration detention centres? How do emotions expressed by INM agents (such as fear, disgust and empathy) enhance or challenge punitive subjectivities?
... As Mayumi emphasised, "What is hard for me is the mental aspect (…) I'm so mentally tortured." This violence operates by instilling in those affected a profound sense of uncertainty and instability (Bosworth 2014;Esposito et al. 2019a;Griffiths 2013;Turnbull 2016). As noted by Wallerstein, the "lack of control over destiny produces a susceptibility to ill-health for people who live in high demand or chronically marginalised situations and who lack adequate resources, supports, or abilities to exert control over their lives" (1992:202). ...
While gendered violence against women at home, in intimate relationships, and in the workplace is widely acknowledged, the relationship between border control and gendered violence has only recently been addressed, often narrowly. To address this gap, this article examines the United Kingdom immigration detention system through an abolition feminist lens. Drawing on research conducted inside and outside detention sites, experiential knowledge from lived experience and solidarity work, and secondary sources, we highlight the entangled and mutually constitutive relationships between intimate/interpersonal and institutional/state violence. Inspired by Monica Cosby’s Intimate Partner Violence and State Violence Power and Control Wheel, our analysis reveals how immigration detention constitutes a form of racist-gendered state-corporate violence. Importantly, those who travel under the sign women understand this violence as directly linked to the gendered abuses they experienced outside detention. This underscores the inseparability of post-national struggles against carceral border regimes from feminist transformative efforts to eradicate gendered violence.
... While the literature on the criminalization of migrants largely talks about 'detention on arrival' (Bosworth 2014), the state of Assam witnesses occurrences when residents are labelled as foreigners. This is how the criminalization of the 'other' morphs into the criminalization of the migrant identity. ...
The article arises from a study located in the Northeast Indian state of Assam. In it, I revisit the colonial imprints that have produced binary constructions of native and outsider. Based on an investigation of the dialogical relationship between a nativist society and anti-migrant policies and practices of the post-colonial state, I argue that those who lie at the periphery of a native-native dichotomy are criminalized. This dichotomy stems from a brahminical culture and structural intersections of gender, caste, class, religion and ethnicity; the intersections define who is a more legitimate resident than the other, eligible to become an ‘authentic citizen’. The article questions why the Bengali-speaking Muslims or lower caste Hindus and women from these communities become ‘convenient proxies’ for illegally migrated Bangladeshis, and are susceptible to punishment by a caste Assamese state. By presenting accounts of people’s lived realities, the article aims to disrupt the hierarchies of identities and experiences that make citizenship relatively accessible.
... As Bosworth has noted, Harmondsworth was created as a space to detain 'Commonwealth citizens denied entry at the border who had been given in-country right of appeal under the Immigration Appeals Act 1969'. 74 This site was the first purpose-built immigration detention centre and the first to be constructed outside a prison or airport. It expanded state power in crucial ways as it 'unlocked the potential for administrative confinement of foreign nationals'. ...
... La detenzione dei migranti destinati all'espulsione è una misura divenuta in anni recenti sempre più comune nelle politiche migratorie dei paesi occidentali (Wilsher 2012;Bosworth 2014;Turnbull 2016;Brotherton, Kretsedemas 2017). Questa tendenza -inaspritasi in tutta Europa nel corso dell'ultimo decennio 7 -s'inscrive con nitidezza all'interno di quella "generalizzazione senza precedenti del paradigma della sicurezza come tecnica normale di governo" che Giorgio Agamben (2003: 24) ha evidenziato nella politica contemporanea. ...
I Centri di Permanenza per il Rimpatrio (CPR) sono luoghi che hanno ricevuto poca attenzione da parte delle scienze sociali. Questo contributo si focalizza sul tema delle condotte autolesionistiche, unanimemente riferite come assai frequenti dagli osservatori, e si propone d’individuare le condizioni che permettano di metterne in risalto la politicità. Tali condizioni saranno delineate, da un lato, tramite l’analisi del sistema CPR, e, dall’altro, per mezzo di un riesame critico dei concetti di “campo” e “agency”, con riferimento obbligato ai lavori di Giorgio Agamben e Michel Foucault. Se questi luoghi – quanto mai “d’eccezione” – sembrano costringere massimamente le possibilità delle persone che vi sono trattenute, abolendo in apparenza il campo del politico, la condotta autolesionistica, qualunque siano le motivazioni che soggettivamente la sostengono, individua il cuore biopolitico di tali istituzioni, rivelando così la propria intrinseca e “oggettiva” politicità.
... The objective is bodily subjection, control and ultimately expulsion, no more, no less' (Pratt, 2001: 60). Detention becomes a site of deterrence in which migrants are punished both physically and mentally, forced to endure uncertainty (Khosravi, 2009), for example, through the constant shifting between detention centres (Bosworth, 2014;Hiemstra, 2013), which symbolizes how the body becomes an object onto which power is asserted (see Mountz, 2018 on the general role of the body in relationships of power, space and politics). Being reduced to a body ('bodying') simultaneously symbolizes 'the imposition of a political identity on migrants through the use of carceral power' (Iskander, 2019(Iskander, : 1374. ...
It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise of force. Yet surprisingly a focus on forces and bodies, and more generally the question of corporeality, has rarely been foregrounded by migration scholars looking at deportation. Academic study of clandestine border crossing as well as detention abounds with descriptions and theorization at the level of the body. Why not deportation? Building on fieldwork with cantonal police units in Switzerland between 2015 and 2017, this paper calls for scholars of deportation to take corporeality seriously. We follow some of the corporeal practices implemented by state actors and related experts and authorities to understand how bodies feature in removal practices in terms of senses, feelings, affects, nerves, pulses, breathing. Violence overarches this scene, but it is by no means the whole story in the state’s struggle for sovereignty and racialised removal, since we should equally register the other moves that are integral to deportation operations such as calming, monitoring, medicating, consoling, dressing, undressing, and inspecting. To overlook the corporeal is to risk producing an overly sanitized, cleansed, tidy depiction of deportation.
... In addition to empirical research on lived experiences of deportable foreign nationals (e.g. Bosworth, 2014;Di Molfetta and Brouwer, 2020;Hasselberg, 2016), coercive measures imposed on foreign offenders and other unwanted non-citizens have been subject to increasing theoretical discussion in criminology. Despite earlier work on the criminalization of immigration law (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.
... The analysis here presented sheds light on the geopolitical entanglements and asymmetries that shape the discourses and practices of migration governance in transit countries and, therefore, speaks to the scholarship that critically examines migration diplomacy (Adamson and Tsourapas 2021;Kutz and Wolff 2020), as well as externalisation arrangements (Biorklund Belliveau and Ferguson 2021;Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2016;Frowd 2020). This paper also relates to the burgeoning literature around migration detention (Bosworth 2014;Campesi 2015;Conlon and Hiemstra 2017) and, more particularly, about migration management in Mexico (Angulo-Pasel 2021; Galemba et al. 2019;Olayo-Méndez, Haymes, and Vidal de Haymes 2014). ...
This paper analyses Mexico's governance of migration and its geopolitical moral dilemma: an enthusiastic champion for migrants' human rights in the international sphere and a tough migration control enforcer. I consider this seemingly ambivalent and contradictory approach through the lens of euphemisms and dysphemisms, more specifically by analysing the use of euphemistic rhetoric and dysphemistic practices in the governance of migration. Through document analysis, I examine Mexico's use of euphemistic rhetoric in its role as migration control enforcer, as well as in its positioning in the relation to the Global Compact on Migration. Drawing on the experiences of irregularised migrants in Mexico and information obtained though Freedom of Information Requests, I analyse three dysphemistic practices in migration management: (i) bureaucratic negligence, (ii) precarious infrastructure, and (iii) spatial fixation and waiting. The Mexican case illustrates the discrepancy between discourse and practice in migration management and is an example of the ambivalences of global migration governance, which instrumentalises euphemistic rhetoric while promoting and tolerating dysphemistic practices.
... Detention of immigrants has been enjoying high levels of interest among researchers and students of broadly understood critical security and migration studies (Bloch and Schuster 2005;Bosworth 2014;Mountz 2021;Schmidt 2021;Tazzioli 2018). The literature indicates that detention of immigrants is one of key governmental mechanisms that entangle the realm of national security and risk management with human mobility and migration policies (Mountz 2015;. ...
Guarded Centres for Foreigners are the key instrument of detention policy in Poland. They are often considered as one of the key and at the same time most secretive forms of securitization and crimi-nalization of foreigners. With panoptical practices of (in)direct observation and robust electronic surveillance the centres are tasked with containing and producing a (self)disciplined, knowable, gov-ernable and deportable immigrant, who can be swiftly expelled from the Polish territory. Building on ethnographic research, including interviews and photographic material, this article explores specific practices and technologies of surveillance in Polish detention centres by describing and discussing how they are deployed by detention personnel. It overviews different types of direct surveillance (e.g direct observation, counting, inspection), at the same time discussing the role of monitoring technologies, which have significantly influenced the practices and spaces of detention. The article concludes that further development of electronic surveillance in the Polish guarded centres may be inevitable and lead to further "panopticonization" of detention in Poland.
... Il campo di tensione generato dal rapporto Stato-migranti è stato risolto in generale, soprattutto dopo il fatidico 11 settembre 2001 e in contrasto con tutte le convenzioni internazionali sulla tutela dei diritti dell'uomo, con il rendere più complicate e sempre più limitative le norme ideate dagli Stati per impedire l'immigrazione, o, appunto, con il promuovere la costruzione di muri. Ed è proprio questo tipo di interventi che, secondo Mary Bosworth nel suo condivisibile Border control and the limits of the sovereign State, dimostra il declino dello Stato di fronte alla globalizzazione e la debolezza e l'incapacità dimostrate da quegli Stati che adottano tali provvedimenti, per lo più di natura squisitamente amministrativa, nella presunzione che si tratti di manifestazioni della loro forza: «The border cannot protect us, or differentiate us from them» (Bosworth 2018: 199-215, in particolare conclusion: 210;Bosworth, 2014). ...
Sebbene le istanze per la limitazione delle migrazioni internazionali fossero già da tempo pressanti, gli attentati dell’11 settembre 2001 sono assurti a momento emblematico di svolta della politica dei confini. Il nuovo secolo si è aperto sotto il segno della riaffermazione della volontà dei governi nazionali, e di riflesso delle istituzioni europee, di ripristinare un più stretto controllo sulla mobilità transfrontaliera, anche a costo di sottrarsi agli obblighi sanciti dalle convenzioni internazionali e di compromettere il proprio impegno per la tutela dei diritti umani. Il tema dei confini interroga anche il mondo accademico e il dibattito scientifico. Intorno ai nessi tra confini, migrazioni e diritti umani, varie discipline scientifiche si confrontano ed en-trano in dialogo con la società. In questa chiave, il presente volume, frutto dell’iniziativa del CRC “Migrazioni e diritti umani” dell’Università degli studi di Milano, intende proporre una riflessione a più voci, da diverse prospettive disciplinari, intorno a una questione così cruciale per il nostro tempo.
Migration control policies are marked by contradictory policy goals set in a complex web of intersecting international, national, and local regulations. This grants significant discretion to frontline workers. Despite the extensive research undertaken on discretion in migration control, there is a lack of comprehensive knowledge on how discretionary practices are patterned across countries and policy domains, what consequences these patterns have for migrants' lives and for receiving states' capacity to govern. Based on a systematic review of 125 articles published between 2001 and 2024, this article addresses this gap. Our findings reveal widespread discretionary practices that vary by decision-making situation but share common patterns, such as frontline workers' perceptions of migrant 'deservingness', institutionalized suspicion, and racialized biases. We offer the concept of 'predictable unpredictability' to theorize the dynamics of frontline discretion. Itcaptures how discretion produces arbitrary outcomes and can be used as a mode of state control which allows state authorities to govern migration without codifying discriminatory sorting mechanisms in formal policies. By this informalization of power, states can avoid responsibility for harmful outcomes of their migration policies, at the same time as the predictable unpredictability in decision-making offers liminal agency to migrants if they 'play the game' of migration control.
Deportation, once a measure for exceptional circumstances, is increasingly becoming the standard response to “illegal migration”. However, far from a seamless policy endeavour, deportation constitutes a complex system that involves various components—detention centres, immigration agencies, legal processes, brokers and profiteers, transportation, documentation, international agreements etc. In taking an infrastructure lens to deportation, this chapter expands upon the socio-technical apparatus of deportation processes as interlinking peoples, materials, and ideas (Larkin 2013; Xiang and Lindquist 2014). Specifically, it builds upon data from India to investigate deportation as an infrastructure of migration regulation that is constituted through the uneven intermeshing of social, material, and biometric dimensions. The chapter thus explores the violent and messy operation of deportation infrastructures (Walters 2018) and proposes future research on their transnational impacts and the transformation of global orders they potentially entail.
Overcrowding and harsh delivery of punishment characterise the Italian prison system. Nonetheless, labour in penal institutions should be a central aspect as a re-educative tool. Social farming is a specific declination of labour activities in prison with a high positive impact on prisoners. In Italy the number of prisoners involved in social farming activities has dropped in the last decade. The Marche region presents a reverse trend with an increase in the number of social farming activities in prisons. This study investigates the Marche region case study to evaluate its output and outcome in the background of reconstructive social theory by Vandenberghe. The qualitative research design adopted (short focused ethnography, interviews, focus groups) shows the number and characteristics of social farming outputs, and the outcomes for the prisoners, institutional stakeholders and citizens. The study highlights the importance of networking between different institutional stakeholders inside and outside the prison, the positive impact on the wellbeing of prisoners and the point of view of citizens and consumers of social farming products. The results highlight the role of social farming in prison as a morphogenetic agent of reconstruction processes for the institutional and administrative personnel, for prisoners and for all citizens as consumers of prison social farming products.
An abridged version of this paper was delivered at the ANZSOC annual conference in Christchurch on 4 December 2024, after the presentation of the Distinguished Criminologist award. Amongst other omissions, the long anecdote about my arrival in the United Kingdom was not included in the lecture due to time constraints. All the material that was delivered orally on the day is reproduced here without significant changes.
This insightful ethnography delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.
In this paper, we examine immigration detention in Portugal, a system whose daily operations and inherent violence are overlooked in both public and academic discourses. Even within community psychology, discussions on immigration detention have largely remained on the fringes of scholarly debates. Guided by a justice‐centered ecological lens, we map the contours of daily life in detention by centering the intersectional struggles of detained cisgender and transgender women. These struggles illuminate the politics of power and resistance at play in these sites, contributing to interrelated ecologies of knowledge and advancing a critical understanding of the systems of power and oppression articulated around borders, citizenship, and the “making of migration.” Our findings reveal Portuguese detention centers as uncaring environments where women feel constantly threatened, unsafe and disregarded, with their well‐being severely compromised. Ignorance reigns in these sites, wielded as a form of power. Yet, despite this, detained women create counterspaces and cultivate ecologies of knowledge and resistance from the ground up. We conclude by reflecting on how community‐engaged scholars and activists can contribute to transformative and liberatory efforts against carceral border systems, working toward futures of freedom, dignity, and justice for all.
In 1985, in an operation Swiss authorities termed “Action Black Autumn,” a group of (mainly) Zaïrean migrants were deported to Zaïre on Switzerland's first documented deportation charter flight. What later would become a routinised practice was at that point still experimental and encountered significant resistance. Based on primary sources, this article looks at expulsion beyond law and policy by focusing on the development of what we call deportation infrastructure. This move allows for a fuller appreciation of the material systems that mediate coercive mobility and shape struggles. The article especially zooms in on questions of violence, resistance and visibility. By engaging the case from these different angles, we will demonstrate that a perspective of infrastructure offers new insights about deportation as a practice.
Family violence is a primary consideration in the exclusion of non-citizens through Australian immigration law and policy. What this engagement of family violence by the Australian state obscures, is the impact of exclusionary mechanisms, specifically visa cancellations, immigration detention and deportations, on women who are victim-survivors of family violence with a temporary migration status. Drawing on interviews with 12 practitioners and one woman with lived experience, I explore the primary and secondary harms of punitive migration policies on migrant and refugee women who have experienced family violence. I focus on five harms: immigration detention as gendered punishment, the positioning of criminalisation above victimisation, hidden harms, ‘undeserving victims’, and consequential visa cancellation. In exploring these harms, I argue that the interests of women with a temporary status often ‘converge’ with the interests of perpetrators, which results in experiences of punishment because of their victimisation. I, therefore, make a new contribution through the framing of victim punishability , and interrogate the Australian state’s co-option of family violence in support of the exclusion of non-citizens. In so doing, I challenge state rhetoric that positions these policies as a legitimate response to tackling gender-based violence.
This chapter suggests that the tensions and arguments underlying
migration law at the turn of the 20th century were mainly driven by two key
ideas: the priority of state sovereignty over individual freedom and the extraordinariness of mass mobility. Common features of the development of migration law in the age of mass migration in different Western countries will be
explored, including: the exceptionality of migration law and its derogation
from constitutional rules; the administrativisation of migration law; the criminalisation of migrants; and the key role played by racial identities in the
building of border control regulations.
This article explores the influence of right-wing social media users on penal policy formation processes. Through a passive digital ethnography approach, the study examines online debates preceding and following recent legislative interventions adopted in Italy by the new right-wing government in power since late 2022, namely the criminalization of unauthorized rave parties and the punitive approach to migration management. The article discusses the role of social media users as prosumers, who both consume and produce content, and shows how social media platforms amplify political polarization by promoting selective exposure to like-minded viewpoints and facilitating the spread of divisive content. It also showcases how prosumers contribute to the propagation of punitive narratives and engage in direct interactions with populist leaders through social media platforms. Conversely, political leaders—specifically Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in this case study—use these platforms to disseminate their narratives and create support for their penal policies, employing fear-mongering tactics and simplistic messaging. Our findings suggest that, while social media platforms have transformed political discourse, in the Italian scenario their direct influence on penal policy making from the ground-up remains limited. Instead, traditional top-down channels continue to dominate the process of penal policy formation.
This article shows how the organizational activities that filter people through borders are shaped by anticipation of migrants’ agency. Through ethnographic research in the United Kingdom’s two largest immigration detention centers, I analyze implementation practices carried out by frontline workers of the Home Office. I question the underexamined relationship between time and organizational action. I find that implementation practices are systematized, in part, by assessments of the future, and are aimed at anticipating and countering detainees’ responses to the possibility of deportation, even before these responses surface. Detainees’ responses can slow the ideal progression of the bureaucratic processes of detention and expulsion, even as speeding up those processes remains a crucial concern of the Home Office organization, largely because of a political fantasy of cost-effectiveness. I argue that more knowledge about these sorts of implementation dynamics allows for reappraisals of policies that remain salient, despite their failures and costs.
This article examines the socio-political implications of using criminal law to address migration issues in Italy. It delves into the polarised political debate characterised by crimmigration, on the one hand, and calls to criminalise border violence to protect migrants, on the other hand. It argues that both uses of penality reflect and foster penal antagonism, whereby both sides of the debate seek to impose their views using punishment. Penal antagonism leads to more migrants being incarcerated and forecloses possibilities for more political changes to the prevailing anti-immigration paradigm. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's work, the article proposes agonistic politics as an alternative approach: a political confrontation to assert one's vision about migration, but where the opponent is an adversary to engage politically rather than an enemy to be delegitimised through penality. Moving from penal antagonism to political agonism could help decouple migration from penality and remove a central source of harm for migrants.
Editorial zum Themenheft zu "Crimmigration: die Verschmelzung von Kriminalität und Migration"
Studies on immigration enforcement and bordered penality frequently depict immigration detention as a system of confinement enforced in closed, relatively opaque facilities geared towards the expeditious deportation of non-citizens. This notion is actually a synecdoche of the diverse forms of containment and the varying, more or less dispensable roles played by detention practices within immigration enforcement systems. This paper challenges this perspective by considering prominent changes taking place in the detention field across Europe, which can be seen as signals of a gradual detention crisis. In this respect, it explores the versatility of detention practices, which have made the detention system particularly resilient. Despite this resilience, though, the paper unveils and maps the obsolescence of detention centric models of immigration enforcement, which manifests itself in the jurisdictions in which detention systems either are largely irrelevant or have been shrinking in the recent past. Additionally, the paper examines the consolidation of the hotspot archipelago in Mediterranean Europe, which has expanded the containment capacity of the border control apparatus and made it increasingly plastic. Yet the hotspot system is in itself an additional manifestation of the obsolescence of detention-centric models of enforcement. After having scrutinised these different dimensions, the paper concludes by exploring the promises and pitfalls of a changing detention landscape and suggesting directions for future research.
This article focuses on multiple bordering practices introduced in the context of the initial COVID -19 responses in Croatia and Serbia. These practices, often focused on the imposition of mobility control, were differently framed, executed and challenged in these two contexts and demonstrated a long-term restructuring of the European border regime at the gates of the EU . The paper outlines and contextualizes constant interplay and mutual stimulation of movement suppression and movement resilience in response to the new virus, blurring and sharpening borders, as seen from these two states at the political and geographical peripheries of Europe. Croatia and Serbia employed spectacularization and invisibilization of movement control, which steadily fostered the further compartmentalization of the population in both countries but with notable differences, especially regarding the control over unwanted migration toward the EU . In the period under discussion, borders were activated, imposed and challenged, exposing the changeability of relations between the EU border regime and the sovereign-nation states which comprise it. Different positions of Serbia and Croatia in the EU border regime also led to differences with regard to movement control, bordering, encampment and the repression exhibited toward people on the move. Old and new typologies of movement repression were tested and employed within the COVID -19 crisis framework, resulting in the further compartmentalization of societies and exclusions
La géographie de l’enfermement s’est largement construite à partir d’une approche de l’enfermement par son rapport à la mobilité. Ce lien originel, fondateur, entre réclusion et mobilité, caractérise la discipline. À partir d’une revue de la littérature et d’éléments empiriques portant sur l’enfermement des étrangers en Roumanie, cet article montre comment les rapports de pouvoir constitutifs de l’enfermement s’exercent à travers ces mobilités. La place des mobilités dans le développement de la géographie de l’enfermement est abordée dans un premier temps. Puis trois échelles de déploiement de ces mobilités sont présentées. Entre établissements fermés d’abord, les mouvements sont décidés et mis en oeuvre par les différents acteurs chargés de l’application des politiques migratoires et pénales ; ces mouvements sont inhérents à la mise en place de la domination institutionnelle. Entre l’intérieur des établissements et leur environnement proche ensuite, les mobilités génèrent des relations dedans-dehors qui participent aux rapports de pouvoir intra-muros. Enfin, l’article traite des déplacements internes aux établissements. Leur gestion constitue un des principaux outils de maintien de l’ordre entre les murs ; mais cet ordre, négocié, accorde une certaine marge de manoeuvre aux personnes enfermées. Les mobilités se révèlent ainsi être un prisme idéal pour étudier certaines déclinaisons des relations de pouvoir dans les institutions fermées.
Much attention has been focused on how states produce knowledge about the people they govern; far less has been written about those aspects of society that states choose to keep obscure. This book makes an original contribution to understanding state ignorance by focusing on one of the most complex and contested social issues of our day: the governance of irregular migrants. Tracing the evolution of state monitoring and control of irregular migrants from the 1960s to the present day across France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the authors develop a theory of 'state ignorance', setting out three complementary ways of understanding such oversights: ignorance as omission, ignorance as strategy, and ignorance as ascription. The findings upend dominant approaches, which tend to assume that states are preoccupied with producing knowledge about their populations, and argues that states have actually been keen to sustain ignorance about their unauthorised populations.
Less than 10% of migrants in immigration detention in the UK are women, despite high-profile cases such as Yarl’s Wood IRC, and so previous research concerned with the experience of detention focuses on the general migrant population which consists mainly of men. Therein lies an uncomfortable gendered nexus between a feminised vulnerability which sustains anti-detention narratives and the somatic masculinity of the detention estate. The experiences of men are treated as the norm, despite the differing and gendered experiences of detained women.
This article addresses this gap by drawing together theoretical and empirical literature focusing on the experiences of migrant women detained in the UK and conceptualising Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) as a microcosm through which to theorise the control and dehumanisation of migrant bodies within the contemporary context of the ‘Hostile Environment’. In particular, this article pays close attention to the intersection of gender and immigration status for migrant detainees as their experiences of pregnancy, sex work and sexual violence implicate how they experience detention.
The Border Reader brings together canonical and cutting-edge humanities and social science scholarship on the US-Mexico border region. Spotlighting the vibrancy of border studies from the field’s emergence to its enduring significance, the essays mobilize feminist, queer, and critical ethnic studies perspectives to theorize the border as a site of epistemic rupture and knowledge production. The chapters speak to how borders exist as regions where people and nation-states negotiate power, citizenship, and questions of empire. Among other topics, these essays examine the lived experiences of the diverse undocumented people who move through and live in the border region; trace the gendered and sexualized experiences of the border; show how the US-Mexico border has become a site of illegality where immigrant bodies become racialized and excluded; and imagine anti- and post-border futures. Foregrounding the interplay of scholarly inquiry and political urgency stemming from the borderlands, The Border Reader presents a unique cross section of critical interventions on the region.
The Nordics have employed discourses of gender equality and women's rights and a welfare‐oriented approach to punishment as integral parts of inclusive welfare states and their ‘goodness’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with non‐citizen women at Vestre Prison in Denmark, this article suggests that the will to punish and banish prevails over the state's commitment to women's rights and protection. Rather than being an inherent feature of incarceration, the pain experienced by non‐citizen women in prison is a ‘political statement’ (Bosworth, 2023). Employing precarisation, incarceration and deportation to govern unwanted non‐citizens and (re)produce the borders of membership, the Danish state also reproduces the conditions for gendered harm. Bordered penality, this article concludes, is gendered.
This article uses testimonies from private sector staff about their experiences of working in sites of short-term immigration detention and in facilitating deportation, to explore the material conditions of this form of custodial labour. Until now, most criminological accounts of criminal justice or border staff have paid little attention to them as workers. As a result, the connections between sites and practices of custody and capital have been obscured. Drawing on a range of scholarship about the labour market and the nature of work, the piece concludes by advocating for new alliances to challenge the precarity and poverty that both lead people into these jobs and justifies them and the exclusionary and divisive politics they engender.
the post-Brexit society that the United Kingdom finds itself in today, it is not controversial to say that immigration has become a ‘hot topic’ among right-wing pundits and socialist advocates. The United Nations Refugee Agency claims that there are as many as 84 million internally displaced peoples as of June 2021, with the vast majority of the 84 million refugees and asylum seekers coming from Eastern Africa and Middle Eastern countries plagued by ongoing conflicts, and now with an estimated 2 million refugees escaping Ukraine this is set to rise exponentially; exasperating the ‘refugee crisis’ beyond measure (UNHCR,2021). The Home Office does not challenge this dialogue, with polarising foreign and domestic policy regarding immigration, and in particular immigration detention. The Home Office adapts its legal policies to follow a criminalisation of the Other, and violates international guidance and legislation to push forward ideas of ‘hostility to discourage’; highlighted most recently by the Nationality and Borders Bill 2022, which amongst other things aims to use increased detention and accommodation centres for Asylum Seekers instead of community housing (Nationality and Borders Bill, 2022, Article 11).In this research piece, ‘Right to
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Remain: An in-depth analysis into the legality of Immigration Detention in the United Kingdom’, I shall discuss what detention is defined as across the United Kingdom, what legal documentation grounds asylum and detention cases, detention conditions and human experience of detention in IRCs, as well as going in-depth into detention policy in the United Kingdom by using a comparative framework. I will then dissect the impact of my findings on the current status of refugees in society and within politics contemporarily, arguing that Immigration Detention in the United Kingdom is a violation of a multitude of laws.
This literature review summarizes findings from 63 articles published between 2001 and 2020 that study discretion of frontline workers at migration control. The results demonstrate that discretionary practices in various migration control situations (e.g., border zones, migration agencies, courts, public welfare services, and detention centers) are widespread but share common patterns. Frontline workers' racialized prejudices and perceptions of migrant deservingness were the most dominant patterns found in the data, although there were some disagreements about which were most influential. Discretion of frontline workers was described as foremost detrimental to migrants, as it amplified the migrants' vulnerable situations, even if it occasionally could increase individual migrants' room for agency and strategic maneuvering. Contrary to the assumption underpinning the control gap-thesis in immigration policy literature that governments' capacity to control migration is hampered by the significant discretion at the frontlines, many studies in our sample describe how governments shape the discretionary practices of frontline workers through informal, subtle, and opaque governing strategies. These informal governing strategies enable central governments to deflect responsibility for discriminatory and inhumane policy outcomes.
This chapter will explore: punishment prior to the emergence of the modern prison; how the modern prison retained some of the features of the old regime; why the prison was designed to deter, punish, and reform; and the birth of the modern prison in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Drawing on document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper analyzes the tensions and paradoxes experienced by lawyers from an independent Human Rights organisation who daily work inside a French immigration detention centre, and provide legal relief to deportable immigrants awaiting their forced removal. On the one hand, these lawyers are activists who see their own job as one of critical advocacy which leads them to legally challenge deportation orders before court. But this mission, on the other hand, is an official one, and compels them to join the regular team of the centre and accept its rules. This strictly legalist perspective is both a strength and a limit to their everyday action, and modifies their capacity to change the fate of detained immigrants.
This timely history explores the entry, reception and resettlement of refugees across twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four cohorts of refugees – Jewish and other refugees from Nazism; Hungarians in 1956; Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin; and Vietnamese 'boat people' who arrived in the wake of the fall of Saigon – Becky Taylor deftly integrates refugee history with key themes in the history of modern Britain. She thus demonstrates how refugees' experiences, rather than being marginal, were emblematic of some of the principal developments in British society. Arguing that Britain's reception of refugees was rarely motivated by humanitarianism, this book reveals the role of Britain's international preoccupations, anxieties and sense of identity; and how refugees' reception was shaped by voluntary efforts and the changing nature of the welfare state. Based on rich archival sources, this study offers a compelling new perspective on changing ideas of Britishness and the place of 'outsiders' in modern Britain.
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