In the United States, immigration is generally seen as a law and order issue. Amidst increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, unauthorized migrants have been cast as lawbreakers. Governing Immigration Through Crime offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the use of crime and punishment to manage undocumented immigrants. Presenting key readings and cutting-edge scholarship, this volume examines a range of contemporary criminalizing practices: restrictive immigration laws, enhanced border policing, workplace audits, detention and deportation, and increased policing of immigration at the state and local level. Of equal importance, the readings highlight how migrants have managed to actively resist these punitive practices. In bringing together critical theorists of immigration to understand how the current political landscape propagates the view of the "illegal alien" as a threat to social order, this text encourages students and general readers alike to think seriously about the place of undocumented immigrants in American society.

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.

Immigration is among the most prominent, enduring, and contentious features of our globalized world. Yet, there is little systematic, cross-national research on why countries "do what they do" when it comes to their immigration policies. Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control addresses this gap by examining what are arguably the most contested and dynamic immigration policies—immigration control—across 25 immigrant-receiving countries, including the U.S. and most of the European Union. The book addresses head on three of the most salient aspects of immigration control: the denial of rights to non-citizens, their physical removal and exclusion from the polity through deportation, and their deprivation of liberty and freedom of movement in immigration detention. In addition to answering the question of why states do what they do, the book describes contemporary trends in what Tom K. Wong refers to as the machinery of immigration control, analyzes the determinants of these trends using a combination of quantitative analysis and fieldwork, and explores whether efforts to deter unwanted immigration are actually working.

In the United States, immigration is generally seen as a law and order issue. Amidst increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, unauthorized migrants have been cast as lawbreakers. Governing Immigration Through Crime offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the use of crime and punishment to manage undocumented immigrants. Presenting key readings and cutting-edge scholarship, this volume examines a range of contemporary criminalizing practices: restrictive immigration laws, enhanced border policing, workplace audits, detention and deportation, and increased policing of immigration at the state and local level. Of equal importance, the readings highlight how migrants have managed to actively resist these punitive practices. In bringing together critical theorists of immigration to understand how the current political landscape propagates the view of the "illegal alien" as a threat to social order, this text encourages students and general readers alike to think seriously about the place of undocumented immigrants in American society.

Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era provides readers with the everyday perspectives of immigrants on what it is like to try to integrate into American society during a time when immigration policy is focused on enforcement and exclusion. The law says that everyone who is not a citizen is an alien. But the social reality is more complicated. Ming Hsu Chen argues that the citizen/alien binary should instead be reframed as a spectrum of citizenship, a concept that emphasizes continuities between the otherwise distinct experiences of membership and belonging for immigrants seeking to become citizens. To understand citizenship from the perspective of noncitizens, this book utilizes interviews with more than one-hundred immigrants of varying legal statuses about their attempts to integrate economically, socially, politically, and legally during a modern era of intense immigration enforcement. Studying the experiences of green card holders, refugees, military service members, temporary workers, international students, and undocumented immigrants uncovers the common plight that underlies their distinctions: limited legal status breeds a sense of citizenship insecurity for all immigrants that inhibits their full integration into society. Bringing together theories of citizenship with empirical data on integration and analysis of contemporary policy, Chen builds a case that formal citizenship status matters more than ever during times of enforcement and argues for constructing pathways to citizenship that enhance both formal and substantive equality of immigrants.

This book is concerned with the government of “illegal” immigration since the passage of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, exploring how certain mentalities and intellectual machineries have rendered illegal immigrants as targets of government. Examines how various authorities have created knowledge about and constructed “illegal” immigration as an ethical problem. Analyzes the tactics that have been deployed to govern immigration, particularly at the US-Mexico border. Using an ethnographic approach, draws on primary source materials – including government publications, archival documents, newspapers, and popular magazines. Studies measures (e.g. Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold-the-Line) for reforming the conduct of “illegal” immigrants in order to forestall illicit border crossings. Frames the study of immigration within Foucauldian theories of governmentality. Highlights the role of numbers and statistics in constructing the “illegal” immigrant.

Examines the nexus between immigration and crime from all of the angles. This work addresses not just the evidence regarding the criminality of immigrants but also the research on the victimization of immigrants; human trafficking; domestic violence; the police handling of human trafficking; and, the exportation to crime problems via deportation.

This paper situates the current “crisis” surrounding the arrival and continued presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States within penological trends that have taken root in American law over the past thirty years. It positions the shift from more benevolent to the increasingly harsh legal treatment of undocumented immigrants as the continuation of a succession of legal reforms criminalizing immigrants, and governing immigration through crime. By charting the increasing salience of crime in public perceptions of undocumented immigrants, and comparing the immediately preceding criminal stigmatization of so-called “criminal aliens”, this paper exposes current severity toward undocumented immigrants as consistent with the post-industrial, post-New Deal approach to viewing problems of social regulation as problems of crime control. It goes on to critiques that approach as exacerbating the same problems for which undocumented immigrants are being blamed.

In the era of globalization, shifting political landscapes, and transnational criminal organizations, discourse around immigration is reaching unprecedented levels. Immigration and the Law is a timely and significant volume of essays that addresses the social, political, and economic contexts of migration in the United States. The contributors analyze the historical and contemporary landscapes of immigration laws, their enforcement, and the discourse surrounding these events, as well as the mechanisms, beliefs, and ideologies that govern them. In today’s highly charged atmosphere, Immigration and the Law gives readers a grounded and broad overview of U.S. immigration law in a single book. Encompassing issues such as shifting demographics, a changing criminal justice system, and volatile political climate, the book is critically significant for academic, political, legal, and social arenas. The contributors offer sound evidence to expose the historical legacy of violence, brutality, manipulation, oppression, marginalization, prejudice, discrimination, power, and control. Demystifying the ways that current ideas of ethnicity, race, gender, and class govern immigration and uphold the functioning and legitimacy of the criminal justice system, Immigration and the Law presents a variety of studies and perspectives that offer a pathway toward addressing long-neglected but vital topics in the discourse on immigration and the law. Contributors Sofía Espinoza Álvarez Steven W. Bender Leo R. Chávez Arnoldo De León Daniel Justino Delgado Roxanne Lynn Doty Brenda I. Gill Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz Peter Laufer Lupe S. Salinas Mary C. Sengstock Martin Guevara Urbina Claudio G. Vera Sánchez

"The breadth of approaches represented here will make this an invaluable resource." Peter Spiro Charles Weiner Professor of Law Temple University Law School.