In Governing Immigration Through Crime, Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda present an important collection of essays examining different ways in which the lines between immigration control and criminal law enforcement in the United States have blurred over the past two decades. As they explain in their introduction, the volume considers how unauthorized migrants “have been constructed as subjects who harm the well-being of American citizens” and examines a resulting set of practices that have “aggressively criminalized unauthorized immigrants” (pp. 2, 28). Crime and punishment, they argue, “have become the preferred means for governing the undocumented,” thereby rendering unauthorized migrants increasingly subject to regulation “through crime and police measures” (p. 28).
The volume includes abridged versions of previously published essays by scholars of anthropology, communications, criminology, ethnic studies, law, political science, sociology, and urban planning. These contributions are organized into five thematic sections, each introduced by an editors' preface offering context and suggestions for additional reading. The first set of chapters lays out overarching legal and conceptual perspectives on the apparent convergence between the norms and practices of immigration regulation, criminal law, and (especially since 2001) national security. The next three sections examine this convergence vis-à-vis three categories of immigration control developments: the fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border, the expansion of interior immigration enforcement, and the resulting emergence of a regime of mass deportation and immigration detention. The overall tenor of the volume is decidedly critical of these trends. While all of these initiatives continue to garner considerable political support—and technology has enabled the efficient development of more pervasive forms of immigration control and surveillance (Kalhan 2014)—the volume does not include any contributions that seek to justify or embrace these developments. The final section highlights the sometimes neglected ways in which unauthorized migrants and their allies have actively protested, challenged, and resisted this increasingly punitive immigration control regime.
Given the editors' framing, it might seem ironic that the volume addresses only in passing the most direct manifestation of what it might mean, on their terms, to “govern immigration through crime”—namely, the direct use of criminal justice institutions as mechanisms of immigration control. As Dowling and Inda observe (pp. 16–17), the number of federal criminal prosecutions for migration-related offenses has skyrocketed in recent years, and as a result, federal prosecutors now bring criminal charges for more migration-related offenses than all other categories of crime combined (Reference MeissnerMeissner et al. 2013: 93–94). In addition, some states and localities now aggressively prosecute criminal laws, such as human trafficking and identity theft offenses, in a manner motivated by immigration control objectives or that targets conduct associated with migration (Reference EaglyEagly 2010).
However, while Dowling and Inda conceptualize “governing immigration through crime” as involving practices that “make crime and punishment the institutional context in which efforts to guide the conduct of immigrants take place” (p. 2), the volume does not narrowly address “crime” or “punishment” as formal legal categories. Rather, the collection aims to highlight more broadly the various ways in which immigration control practices increasingly draw on norms and mechanisms traditionally associated with the criminal law. Indeed, with the volume's title, Dowling and Inda self-consciously echo the work of Jonathan Simon, who has explained how political actors have utilized the category of crime to “legitimate interventions that have other motivations” in a variety of domains and how, as a result, the “technologies, discourses, and metaphors of crime and criminal justice” have been prominently deployed to address social problems across an ever-widening array of institutional settings (Reference SimonSimon 2007: 4–5). While Dowling and Inda do not elaborate on their organizing theme as fully as some readers might wish, they plainly mean to posit immigration control as one of these domains. And with good reason. While deportation is formally a civil sanction, immigration control initiatives have drawn heavily from the norms and practices of criminal law enforcement as they have proliferated in recent decades. In the view of some scholars, this convergence has amounted to a wholesale merger of immigration and criminal law—giving rise to what Juliet Stumpf (in an article included in this volume) has influentially termed “crimmigration” law (pp. 59–76).
This body of scholarship persuasively depicts the emergence of a regime of quasi-punitive immigration control and mass deportation over the past two decades, and Governing Immigration Through Crime effectively captures that compelling picture. Less prominent in that body of scholarship, and by extension in this volume as well, are qualifications that might suggest potential limits to the apparent convergence between immigration and crime control. Some readers might be left with a somewhat flattened view in which immigration control is seen as having been swallowed whole by the politics of crime, and therefore as inevitably following the same trajectory. It remains for other work to carefully disentangle the immigration control and criminal justice norms and practices that have given rise to this regime, to consider whether and to what extent immigration control might have its own independent logic or follow a path that diverges, in any respects, from the trajectory of the criminal justice system. Moreover, as Dowling and Inda themselves acknowledge (pp. 28–29), the volume also focuses primarily on Latino experiences and almost exclusively on the experiences of unauthorized migrants, devoting less attention to the experiences of other racial and ethnic groups who are subject to mass immigration control or of the large numbers of noncitizens who are lawfully present but face the possibility of “delegalization” and subsequent deportation (Reference ShahaniShahani 2006). However, a single introductory volume necessarily can only scratch the surface in addressing the many questions that scholars have addressed concerning the convergence between immigration control and criminal justice.
Governing Immigration Through Crime provides a valuable introduction for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in the many ways in which the norms and practices of immigration control and criminal justice have converged. Dowling and Inda have compiled a solid collection of essays representing an impressively wide range of disciplinary perspectives, and they helpfully frame those essays with their own thoughtful introduction and suggestions for additional reading. The volume is a useful resource for anyone seeking an entry point into this dynamic area of scholarship.
