‘A really hostile environment’: Adiaphorization, global policing and the crimmigration control system (original) (raw)
Related papers
The hostile environment and crimmigration: blurring the lines between civil and criminal law
Soundings, 2020
The recent media furore surrounding the UK government's hostile environment policy and the treatment of the Windrush generation drew attention to the use of criminal law for regulatory purposes within the context of immigration. The proliferation of immigration offences, and the reproduction of criminal provisions in immigration laws, signals a blurring of the lines between the civil and criminal legal realms: while immigration law purports to be administrative in character it is often effected through criminal law, which is used against citizens and non-citizens in breach of immigration rules when immigration measures alone are ineffective. These 'crimmigration' measures can be understood as examples of hybrid proceduralism. The civil/criminal procedural hybrids used in 'crimmigration' processes are borne of ideologically motivated political expediency, and disproportionately disadvantage vulnerable populations, who are frequently portrayed as deviant. They priv...
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’.
The UK's hostile environment: Deputising immigration control
Critical Social Policy, 2021
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 mar-ginalisation, 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. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0261018320980653
Coerced to Leave: Punishment and the Surveillance of Foreign-National Offenders in the UK
2014
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London among foreign-national offenders facing deportation from the United Kingdom, this paper seeks to examine how foreign-national offenders experience and understand state policies of control. Worldwide, foreign-nationals are increasingly subject to forms of state surveillance, not just when crossing borders but also during their stay within a given state’s territory. Detention centres, weekly or monthly reporting requirements, and electronic monitoring are already common migrant surveillance strategies allied to deportation policies in many countries across the globe. These forms of state control are conceived legally as administrative practices necessary to control foreign-nationals whose status is still being adjudicated and to enforce the removal of unwanted foreign-nationals. Consequently, these strategies are not inflicted through a judicial process, even though these same practices are used within the context of penal incarceration and supervision. The lived experience of deportability and associated state surveillance highlights the punitive and coercive effects of detention and related conditions of bail. Ironically, but perhaps not unintentionally, those who are deemed a risk and subject to surveillance and banishment are therefore constantly feeling vulnerable and in need of protection. Because they do not consider themselves a risk to society, the foreign-national offenders interviewed for this study understand state surveillance not as a measure of control, but rather as punishment for wanting to stay. In their eyes, it is designed to coerce them to leave. An examination of the experiences of detention and bail reveals how such forms of surveillance work to discipline deportable bodies.
Routledge Handbook of European Penology, 2025
This chapter examines the consequences of a system of control emerging at the intersection of criminal enforcement and migration control, from the perspective of the sociology of punishment. The first section describes how migration control practices increasingly adopt tools traditionally used by the criminal justice system, and the impact this has on the human rights of migrants and asylum seekers, particularly in European countries. It highlights how EU policies are contributing to the criminalization of migration, while simultaneously transforming traditional penal practices into more exclusionary mechanisms. The second section analyses how bordered forms of penality challenge traditional notions of punishment. It argues that border control practices combine punitive and security-oriented logics, blurring the lines between punishment, prevention, and security. The third section reflects on the functions of bordered penality. It discusses two main perspectives: one rooted in Durkheimian sociology, focusing on the symbolic and exclusionary aspects, and another influenced by Marxist and Foucauldian approaches, emphasizing the instrumental use of contemporary coercive migration control. The chapter will conclude by calling for more integration between the different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives in the study of migration control and punishment.
Critical Criminology, 2020
In the context of heightened debate around increasingly hostile immigration policies, the detention and deportation of people with long-standing connections to the United Kingdom (UK) have, within the last few years, received public attention. Such individuals—people who were born in or came to the UK as children—make up a significant proportion of the “foreign criminal” population in detention. This article examines how those individuals with long-standing links, who also have criminal convictions, are often “erased” by the British state. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with men currently and formerly held in immigration removal centers, I argue that institutional failings in immigration and local authority care “guide” some who grow up in the UK toward (and into) the criminal justice system. Shunning responsibility for these failings, the British state enacts a further punishment through immigration detention and attempted deportation. Despite acts that resist and problematize foreignness, detained “Brits” experience specific harms that change the way they feel about identity and belonging in Britain. These processes highlight the ways that national identity and immigration status intersect with class, gender and race to produce traumatic experiences of cultural denationalization.
Prison Service Journal, 2008
Despite its primacy in political debate the issue of asylum has been largely ignored by criminologists within the United Kingdom. This paper discusses how legislative and discursive responses to asylum seekers and refugees have reconceptualised such individuals as criminal, dangerous and deviant. The policy response to asylum appears to mirror the trend of increasingly punitive crime control mechanisms employed within the criminal justice field. Furthermore, it is suggested that discursive practice has served to construct a mythic image of a deviant and criminal asylum seeking population that has enabled the justification of increasingly restrictive and draconian legislation and policy. This paper utilizes criminological and penal theory to explain such developments. As such it is argued that current policy developments can only make sense if asylum seekers are problematized as deviant and dangerous.
Policing Migration: A Framework for Investigating the Regulation of Global Mobility
2004
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.
Protection, Crime and Punishment: Regulation at the Nexus of Crimmigration and Refugee Law
Catherine Dauvergne (ed), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2021), 277-290. , 2021
Australia, notoriously, allows for the mandatory, indefinite detention of all non-citizens who arrive in its territory without authorisation. While the use of administrative detention is on the rise in many states, Australia is increasingly using new means to control and exclude asylum seeker populations. Non-detention based technologies of temporariness, socio-economic insecurity and surveillance are being employed in place of the use of mandatory, indefinite detention of refugee applicants. All the while, though, the law and policy of mandatory detention has remained in place. This chapter will use the conceptual frame of crimmigration, first articulated by Stumpf in the US context, to investigate the policy and practice of mandatory detention of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. It does so to ask two questions: to what extent does Australia’s regulation of asylum seekers accord with or deviate from crimmigration trends of the merging of the legal and institutional practices of criminal and immigration law?; and how does the regulation of asylum seekers in Australia deviate from the stated policy of nominally mandatory, non-discretionary detention? By examining the governance of “onshore” asylum seekers, I suggest that the lens of crimmigration allows us to pay attention to new means of refugee control and exclusion, while also revealing what is unique about crimmigration practice in an Australian context.