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.
The United States deported nearly two million illegal immigrants during the first five years of the Obama presidency—more than during any previous administration. President Obama stands accused by activists of being “deporter in chief.” Yet despite efforts to rebuild what many see as a broken system, the president has not yet been able to convince Congress to pass new immigration legislation, and his record remains rooted in a political landscape that was created long before his election. Deportation numbers have actually been on the rise since 1996, when two federal statutes sought to delegate a portion of the responsibilities for immigration enforcement to local authorities. Policing Immigrants traces the transition of immigration enforcement from a traditionally federal power exercised primarily near the US borders to a patchwork system of local policing that extends throughout the country’s interior. Since federal authorities set local law enforcement to the task of bringing suspected illegal immigrants to the federal government’s attention, local responses have varied. While some localities have resisted the work, others have aggressively sought out unauthorized immigrants, often seeking to further their own objectives by putting their own stamp on immigration policing. Tellingly, how a community responds can best be predicted not by conditions like crime rates or the state of the local economy but rather by the level of conservatism among local voters. What has resulted, the authors argue, is a system that is neither just nor effective—one that threatens the core crime-fighting mission of policing by promoting racial profiling, creating fear in immigrant communities, and undermining the critical community-based function of local policing.
Migration policing experiments such as boat turn-backs and offshore refugee processing have been criticised as unlawful and have been characterised as exceptional. Policing Undocumented Migrants explores the extraordinarily routine, powerful, and above all lawful practices engaged in policing status within state territory. This book reveals how the everyday violence of migration law is activated by making people ‘illegal’. It explains how undocumented migrants are marginalised through the broad discretion underpinning existing frameworks of legal responsibility for migration policing. Drawing on interviews with people with lived experience of undocumented status within Australia, perspectives from advocates, detailed analysis of legislation, case law and policy, this book provides an in-depth account of the experiences and legal regulation of undocumented migrants within Australia. Case studies of street policing, immigration raids, transitions in legal status such as release from immigration detention, and character based visa determination challenge conventional binaries in migration analysis between the citizen and non-citizen and between lawful and unlawful status. By showing the organised and central role of discretionary legal authority in policing status, this book proposes a new perspective through which responsibility for migration legal practices can be better understood and evaluated. Policing Undocumented Migrants will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in the areas of criminology, criminal law, immigration law and border studies.
Police-citizen relations are in the public spotlight following outbursts of anger and violence. Such clashes often happen as a response to fatal police shootings, racial or ethnic discrimination, or the mishandling of mass protests. But even in such cases, citizens’ assessment of the police differs considerably across social groups. This raises the question of the sources and impediments of citizens’ trust and support for police. Why are police-citizen relations much better in some countries than in others? Are police-minority relations doomed to be strained? And which police practices and policing policies generate trust and legitimacy? Research on police legitimacy has been centred on US experiences, and relied on procedural justice as the main theoretical approach. This book questions whether this approach is suitable and sufficient to understand public attitudes towards the police across different countries and regions of the world. This volume shows that the impact of macro-level conditions, of societal cleavages, and of state and political institutions on police-citizen relations has too often been neglected in contemporary research. Building on empirical studies from around the world as well as cross-national comparisons, this volume considerably expands current perspectives on the sources of police legitimacy and citizens’ trust in the police. Combining the analysis of micro-level interactions with a perspective on the contextual framework and varying national conditions, the contributions to this book illustrate the strength of a broadened perspective and lead us to ask how specific national frameworks shape the experiences of policing.
The surveillance of immigrants and potential terrorists preoccupies leaders throughout the industrialised world. Yet these concerns are hardly new. This text examines a critical movement in the history of immigration control and political surveillance.
Winner, 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association Latino/a Section The intimate stories of 147 deportees that exposes the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportations in the U.S. The United States currently is deporting more people than ever before: 4 million people have been deported since 1997 –twice as many as all people deported prior to 1996. There is a disturbing pattern in the population deported: 97% of deportees are sent to Latin America or the Caribbean, and 88% are men, many of whom were originally detained through the U.S. criminal justice system. Weaving together hard-hitting critique and moving first-person testimonials, Deported tells the intimate stories of people caught in an immigration law enforcement dragnet that serves the aims of global capitalism. Tanya Golash-Boza uses the stories of 147 of these deportees to explore the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportation in the United States, showing how this crisis is embedded in economic restructuring, neoliberal reforms, and the disproportionate criminalization of black and Latino men. In the United States, outsourcing creates service sector jobs and more of a need for the unskilled jobs that attract immigrants looking for new opportunities, but it also leads to deindustrialization, decline in urban communities, and, consequently, heavy policing. Many immigrants are exposed to the same racial profiling and policing as native-born blacks and Latinos. Unlike the native-born, though, when immigrants enter the criminal justice system, deportation is often their only way out. Ultimately, Golash-Boza argues that deportation has become a state strategy of social control, both in the United States and in the many countries that receive deportees.
The relationship between undocumented immigrants and law enforcement officials continues to be a politically contentious topic in the United States. Nolan Kline focuses on the hidden, health-related impacts of immigrant policing to examine the role of policy in shaping health inequality in the U.S., and responds to fundamental questions regarding biopolitics, especially how policy can reinforce ‘race’ as a vehicle of social division. He argues that immigration enforcement policy results in a shadow medical system, shapes immigrants’ health and interpersonal relationships, and has health-related impacts that extend beyond immigrants to affect health providers, immigrant rights groups, hospitals, and the overall health system. Pathogenic Policing follows current immigrant policing regimes in Georgia and contextualizes contemporary legislation and law enforcement practices against a backdrop of historical forms of political exclusion from health and social services for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. For anyone concerned about the health of the most vulnerable among us, and those who interact with the overall health safety net, this will be an eye-opening read.
Who polices immigration? : establishing the role of state and local law enforcement agencies in immigration control -- Setting up the local deportation regime -- Policing immigrant Nashville -- The driving to deportation pipeline -- Inside the jail -- Lost in translation : two worlds of immigration policing
