Fear-mongering and immigration policymaking

By Emily Torstveit Ngara In announcing his run for President of the United States, Donald Trump brought anti-immigrant rhetoric back into the national spotlight by proclaiming that “[w]hen Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best...They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Trump’s vitriol is nothing new. Throughout the history of U.S. immigration, the same themes recur in cycles. One prominent theme is “immigrants are immoral, dangerous criminals.” This rhetoric does more than promote a hostile environment [...]

Naturalizing immigration imprisonment

On the civil side, ICE now operates an immigration detention archipelago that has no historical precedent in the United States. Meanwhile, the U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons hold thousands of migrants facing criminal charges for migration-related activity or being punished after conviction. Readers of crimmigration.com are well aware of this trend. In my latest academic article, Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment, I show that confinement under civil and criminal powers are sufficiently similar to constitute a single phenomenon: immigration imprisonment. Published this week in the [...]

Liberal imprisonment

The United States is no stranger to incarceration. We lock up millions of people every year, with a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Imprisonment is such a core feature of life in the contemporary United States that it’s hard to imagine a time before confinement became fetishized: regarded with awe, thought to have magical powers capable of curing countless ills, real and perceived. But of course such a time did exist. Hyperincarceration, to borrow Loïc Wacquant’s insightful term, is a relatively new phenomenon—one traceable to the final thirty years or so of the twentieth [...]

Crimmigration’s Social Foundations: Anti-Latino Attitudes Linked to Support for Discriminatory Policing

By Justin T. Pickett Immigration enforcement is a salient social and political issue in the contemporary United States. The extant evidence suggests that a key reason that many members of the public support harsh anti-immigration policies, such as building a border fence or denying emergency healthcare to illegal immigrants, is that they believe illegal immigrants hurt the U.S. by committing crimes, taking away jobs from Americans, and weakening American cultural values. At the same time, immigration enforcement is increasingly occurring through the criminal justice system, and involves [...]

Colorado’s human smuggling crime

As the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly reiterated since the late nineteenth century, immigration law is an area of federal dominance. The power “to forbid the entrance of foreigners . . . or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe[,]”[1] the Court wrote in 1892, “is vested in the national government.”[2] More recently, the Court explained in 2012 that the federal government has “broad, undoubted power over the subject of immigration.”[3] Despite the federal government’s expansive reach in immigration law, the states nonetheless [...]

Creating & Policing Migrant Illegality in Europe

Distressing news reports from Europe keep coming in. A dozen migrants died here trying to make their way from Africa, a few hundred there. Italy claims it’s outmatched and needs European Union support. Spain says it’s interested in a humanitarian response. Meanwhile, I imagine the ghost of Muammar Gaddafi wryly admonishing its former European powers with an “I told you so” years after warning that his fall would mean Libya would no longer apply a heavy hand to keep migrants in Africa. Lost from this conventional account are the many people who are directly engaged in the migration process. [...]

Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment

Every day, roughly 33,000 people spend the night imprisoned while waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Thousands more are confined on charges of having committed an immigration crime. Others are behind bars because they were already convicted. The substantive law that applies to people in each of these categories differs: civil law governed by the Immigration and Naturalization Act for those in removal proceedings, and criminal law governed by the federal penal code (and, to a smaller degree, its state counterparts). That is largely where the [...]

State crimmigration lawmaking

Immigration law, the standard refrain goes, is firmly in the hands of the federal government. In the language of judicial doctrine, the federal government has plenary power over immigration. As the Supreme Court put it in the late nineteenth century, “It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe. In the United States this power is vested in [...]