Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue, “Critical Engagements with Borders, Racisms and State Violence” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Racial Criminalisation of Migrants in the 21st Century
This book collects some contributions proposed for the workshop ‘Criminalization and victimization of immigrants in Europe’, organized by S. Palidda at the Dipartimento di Scienze Antropologiche of Genoa University, in the framework of Workpackage 3, ‘Processes of criminalization and (de)criminalization’, of the Crimprev Programme (Assessing Deviance, Crime and Prevention in Europe–Coordination Action – 6th FWP – Contract No. 028300 financed by the European Commission). The contributions collected in this volume show the most elementary mechanism of social control, emerging as being useful, if not indispensable, to the solidity and/or realignment of political cohesion. The latter is in fact nourished by the fear and the insecurity attributed to such an enemy to justify practices of power that blend all sorts of prohibitionism, protectionism and authoritarianism, which also target the weaker segments of the indigenous population. The war against outsiders, against those who are different, may thus be considered one of the ‘total political facts’ that pervades a society through discourses, rhetoric and practices that consolidate a real or supposed majority. Hence, it will be argued here, in the current racist approach that characterizes the management of societies we can find that there are overlaps with the discourses and practices applied to colonized peoples and the subordinate classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other terms, the persecution of gypsies and the criminalization of migrants is currently written into a neoliberal/neoconservative political framework based on the asymmetry of power and wealth between actors that are all-powerful, and weak ones who have no rights and/or are reduced to the state of ‘non-persons’.
HOW THE CURRENT 'MIGRATION CRISIS' CHALLENGES EUROPEAN CRIMINOLOGISTS
Criminologists are used to the topics they study being high on political agendas. They know that such issues can rise to exceptional heights in response to particular events, as well as how these are presented in traditional and new media. This article looks into how fears over and responses to migration to Europe express themselves in (at least) seven distinct ways that criminologists should be paying attention to; (1) the relationship between decisions to migrate and migration policies, (2) how media accounts for and civil society impact on policy development, (3) the role of migration brokers, agencies and human smugglers in the migration process, (4) the link between increase and diversification of migration, smuggling of immigrants and human trafficking, (5) how fears and debates over migration links to crimes committed by or against immigrants, (6) the relationship between immigration to a country and the levels and forms of crimes they experience, and (7) the perceptions of societies towards newly-arrived foreigners (immigrants or asylum seekers). It is important to first approach definitional issues. People arriving in Europe are often referred to as migrants or refugees. The difference between these two designations is important in both practical and symbolic terms, but while in transit and upon arrival, people who are leaving their home countries because of lack of freedom and poverty are indistinguishable from people who are fleeing a form and level of persecution which makes them eligible for asylum. The end result of an asylum procedure (or an international protection requirement) does also not rule out that rejected asylum seekers submitted a just claim for protection. We thus warn not to pit one category against another, posing one as deserving and the other non-deserving. The right to apply for asylum and have one's need for protection evaluated is individual, and thus we cannot determine whether someone is a 'mere' economic migrant or a refugee deserving asylum simply from their country of origin (Carling 2015). Bearing this complexity in mind, it is still important to stress that divisions between economic immigrants, refugees/international protection seekers, or trafficked persons (to name a few categories) matters and must retain its relevance to criminologists, as each of these concepts points to different legislation and sets of rights and obligations. Being or being treated as an economic migrant to Europe is a harsh predicament for third country nationals. While there have been several attempts to award residency also to migrants who are not eligible for asylum through processes of mass regularisation over the last 50 years 1 (Kraler, 2009), in the last few years the European Union has taken steps to narrow the possibility to stay for migrants who are not experts and are not deemed in need of protection parallel to a strengthening a policy of return and deportations with Directive 2008/115/UE 2. This Directive states the aim of returning migrants that for different reasons do not have the right to stayin Europe, being obliged to go back to their home countries or the last country they resided in before arriving in Europe at the same time as it establishes the possibility of detaining immigrants awaiting removal from the European Union Member States. The maximum recommended time limit of 6 months 3 , with a possible extension up to 18 months in exceptional conditions 4. Over this same period, the USA has also moved from an expansion of the rights of migrants in the 1980s to the representation of immigrants as a threat. Stumpf (2006: 382) has linked this to the high number of arrival of asylum seekers from SouthEast Asia to the USA (Stumpf, 2006: 382), something which was understood as economic migration and an attempt to exploit the US's social security system. Immigrants/non-nationals were accused of contributing to the rise in crime, and immigration policies came to be seen as a tool to control this, a part of the process we often refer to as 'crimmigration' (Stumpf 2006). The coming together of criminal and migration law and the emergence of the image of the criminal stranger, took part in limiting rights and protections offered to migrants and opened up space for repressive measures, such as prolonged detention for new migration-related crimes (Stumpf, 2006: 381-384). While recent developments in terms of high numbers of arrivals and rapidly changing migration policies in various European countries are attracting much attention, managing migration as a
Goode/The Handbook of Deviance, 2015
This paper is intended to circulate work that readers might otherwise be unable to access. If your institution does not have a copy or an order for a copy of the above work this can be placed here http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118701429.html Recent decades have witnessed two contradictions in global mobility. Hypermobile flows of capital and goods cascading around the globe, facilitated by an increasingly hegemonic neoliberal economic model and an accompanying web of trade agreements, are concurrent with increasingly restricted mobility of persons-at least those emergent from the global South (Bauman 1998). The construction through law, technology, fortification and intensified policing of the 'wall around the West' (Andreas & Snyder 2000) has resulted in a massive production of 'illegal aliens' in the global North (Fassin 2011, p. 214). As the potential pathways for those seeking to escape economic deprivation or political and social persecution in the global South have been progressively barricaded, so too have such movements been progressively criminalized. The fabrication of the 'wall around the West' has witnessed the emergence of a substantial border control apparatus, often technologically mediated and buttressed by punitive legal developments, that is itself criminogenic and instrumental in the construction of 'deviant' migrant identities. Border control has also been loosened from its moorings, no longer a distinct geographical line but deterritorialized (Walters 2006) so that now it is possible to speak of 'ubiquitous borders' (Wilson & Weber 2008) that may be enacted before, at and after the physical borderline at a variety of switch points and by a multiplicity of agents. The exclusion and construction of deviant migrant identities is intertwined with two other notable developments. One is the weakening of the nation-state form, and there is a significant scholarship which interprets intensifying border control and practices of exclusion in terms of 'performances' of sovereignty. This is an argument that suggests that under conditions of neoliberal globalization, states with diminished control of economic and social questions within their boundaries increasingly turn to border security and migration control as key 'performances' asserting their continued relevance and strength (Wilson and Weber 2008;
Marginalizing Migrants: Illegality, Racialization and Vulnerability
This chapter examines how migrant ‘deviance’ is constructed at the global and local level through processes of control manifested through law and policing. Commencing at the global level, the discussion then moves to consider the constitutive role of national and local border control agents in processes of exclusion and criminalization. The chapter will then consider the individual experiences of such control, and how such intensified controls both fabricate and escalate deviance. The discussion then considers the intensified incarceration and deportation of irregular migrants, and how the stigma and criminalization of the deportation experience often lingers upon individual identities following their forced return to the global South.