In another of his insightful essays on “Aliens, Crime, and Drugs: Making the Connection,” Tom Barry traces the origins of crImmigration to the 1970s and 1980s crackdown on non-violent crime. He argues that the criminalization of immigration stems directly from the popularity of “governing through crime”–that is, using the fear of crime to promote unduly harsh social policies. According to Barry, senior analyst at the Center for International Policy,
“The way we have decided to deal with these outsiders – the 30 million illegal and legal immigrants who live among us – is how we already decided to deal with ourselves. In the early 1970s America began a new experiment in social engineering and control. It rejected the liberal, democratic, and humanitarian impulses that had previously played such an important role in defining who we were as Americans. Instead of hope, fear increasingly defined governance in social policy. Increasing drug use and rising urban crime were met with reactionary policies rather than problem solving – the get-tough wars on drugs and crime. We began “governing through crime,” as criminal justice scholar Jonathan Simon has observed.”
“The immigration system,” he concludes “has been shifted to the criminal justice system.”
I don’t disagree with Barry’s argument that this country’s prison fetish has made possible the rapid and enormous growth in immigration detentions and the increasing criminalization of immigration. Nevertheless, as I wrote last year in the St. Thomas Law Review, the convergence of criminal law and immigration law can be traced back at least 100 years–to the turn of the 20th century: “By combining these two divergent strains of the law’s coercive apparatus, federal government officials harnessed the policing tools granted by both the newly expanding application of the Interstate Commerce Clause to regulate morality and the plenary power of Congress to dictate immigration restrictions.”
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