Annual Roger Hood Lecture: (De)constructing the crimmigrant other: migration, citizenship, and penal power

In the 1920’s, Adolfo Baldizzi, a skilled cabinetmaker and stowaway from Sicily, landed in New York harbour to find employment. One year later, Rosaria Baldizzi entered the country with illegitimate papers. The Baldizzis embarked on a trip to Canada with the aim of re-entering America “legally” so that their migration status would finally be regularised. This story caught Professor Franko’s eye in the Tenement Museum in New York. For her, it acknowledges irregular migration as a celebrated part of national history and a legitimate path to political membership. The story also exposes the intricate connections between migration and illegality which make people vulnerable to state penal power. Today, the probability of regularization and political inclusion is much smaller as contemporary penal systems increasingly produce immigrant illegality, and construct what Professor Franko calls “the crimmigrant other”.

As a relevant starting point for the 2019 Annual Rodger Hood Lecture, Professor Franko presented Nils Christie’s observation that “crime does not exist”. “Only acts exist”, Christie argued, “acts often given different meanings within various social frameworks [...] Our challenge is to follow the destiny of acts through the universe of meanings. Particularly, what are the social conditions that encourage or prevent giving the acts the meaning of being crime” (Christie, 2004: 3).

So, what are these social conditions that render acts of mobility subject to penal power and produce the figure of the “crimmigrant other”? To offer a response, Professor Franko examined the developments through which contemporary societies, particularly in Europe, increasingly meet acts like those committed by the Baldizzis with state penal measures and, ultimately, deportation and cancellation of claims to membership. Grounding her analysis in the Norwegian context, she first outlined five defining features of the “crimmigrant other” and its production through the “intricate connections between law, scientific knowledge, bureaucratic practices, politics, media and popular discourse”. She then traced how migration is not simply criminalised, but it is also moralised. Finally, she analysed what moral work this figure performs in society – specifically, its capacity to carve out boundaries between deserving and non-deserving migrants, prop up the border regime, and detract from structural sources of illegality.

What is the “crimmigrant other”?

The “crimmigrant other” is a figure assembled by Professor Franko out of various bodies of literature on (people treated as) non-citizens/migrants (“Homini sacri”, Agamben; “strangers”, Simmel; “suitable enemies”, Christie; “the delinquent”, Foucault) and the mechanisms through which they are produced (“crimmigration law”, Stumpf, 2006; “bordered penality”, Aas, 2014). Although she did not define the term “other” itself, she claimed the “crimmigrant other” is a figure of the unwanted. Importantly, Professor Franko warns, the term may be a dangerous one with the potential to eclipse deeper understanding and prevent dialogue. Nonetheless, she finds it useful to interrogate the connections between migration control and the use of penal and military power, and humanitarian rationalities, as will be shown.

Professor Franko outlined five defining features of the “crimmigrant other” gleaned from the work of fellow border criminologists and migration scholars, and illustrated by her interviews with 78 Norwegian police officers working on border control conducted between 2012-2016 by herself and Helene O.I. Gundus.

1) The Spectacle. The first defining feature of the “crimmigrant other” is the spectacle. This refers to the political and media production of migrants as a threat, orbiting within sensationalist discourses of “invasion” and “flooding” (Debord, 1970; De Genova, 2014). To take one literal example of the staged features of security, in Austria, migrant actors were hired and photographed alongside Austrian police to showcase the ability of the latter to perform their borders.

2) The “crimmigrant body”. Unlike the “spectacle”, this feature refers to the everyday bureaucratic state practices through which the “crimmigrant” body is produced as a distinct penal object (Caplan and Torpey, 2001; Aas, 2006, 2011). Developing the Foucauldian focus on the body, border criminologists have analysed the technologically and scientifically mediated systems that render bodies “legible” (Scott, 1998), such as use of Eurodac. Ultimately, people’s own stories and narratives are deemed untrustworthy while biometric systems are seen to legitimately extract “truth from the body” (Fassin, 2011; Ticktin, 2011)– which may often involve the use of force as captured in the EU Commission 2015 statement that if migrants do not cooperate “Member States should […] use coercion as last resort”.

3) Illegality. Illegality, Professor Franko suggests, is close to becoming an existential condition. Someone’s mere existence is a criminal offence – especially those born in the “global south” which may become a “legal handicap” in Europe (Guild, 2009; Dauvergne, 2009; Aliverti, 2013). As Menjívar and Kanstroom have observed, when it comes to punishment, in most modern legal systems it “is the conduct that counts, not legal status. In immigration law, however, the relationship between legal conduct and status is inherently quite complicated” (2014: 2). These “complications” were a recurrent theme in Professor Franko’s interviews with Norwegian police officers for whom it was not uncommon to “find a person first, then an offence that could be pinned on them”. Officers systematically associated particular groups of people with criminality, which shapes the daily lives of large populations in society. Criminalisation is not only symbolic, as scholars such as Aliverti (2012) have extensively documented. Criminalisation is also very real, Professor Franko asserted. The increase from 6 months to 2 years for breaching re-entry bans in Norway is but one example.

4) Deportability. The fourth aspect of the “crimmigrant other” is their deportability. From exclusion in immigration detention centres to a permanent exclusion from the community through deportation – conceptualised as the shift from “panopticism” to “ban-opticism” (Bigo, 2006) – the “crimmigrant other” is bureaucratically constructed as a distinct penal subject. In Norway, the workings of the “deportation machine” (Fekete, 2005) have been enhanced as expulsion numbers are now an official police performance target. This has resulted in a nearly four-fold increase in “returns” between 2007 (2630) and 2016 (9534).

5) Power/knowledge. Finally, the Foucauldian power/knowledge relation underlies the other four defining features of the “crimmigrant other”. Through deportation targets to official hierarchies of threat posed by different nationalities (Frontex’s “top 10 nationalities”), the criminogenic nature of immigrant populations is not only produced but measured. As Franko has argued elsewhere, it is important to ask what is not measured? Deaths on the border are not counted by Frontex.

After documenting the ways in which the “crimmigrant other” is produced, measured and subject to a distinct penal regime that is used to justify even stricter border controls (Bosworth, 2014; Kaufman, 2015; Ugelvik and Damsa, 2017), she unpacked how migration is not simply securitised and criminalised, but also moralised.

From criminalisation to the moralisation of migration

Noticing the centrality of humanitarian sentiments and moral judgements among some police officers, Professor Franko proposed that the “crimmigrant other” is “pulling together a regime of governance combining penal and military power on the one hand, and humanitarian rationalities on the other”. She used her interviews to trace the ways in which “the use of penal power at the border is deeply problematic, also for the people deploying it”, who, she argues elsewhere, have “internalised and appropriated” humanitarian discourses.

Norwegian police officers navigating the demands of professional efficiency, the pressure to achieve deportation targets and the “deeply problematic, contentious” nature of the work, have found themselves asking “how to be humane in a deeply inhumane situation?” and “are the people targeted victims or offenders?”. Reflecting on an immigration raid, one officer exclaimed “You wish to be efficient and not to come in vain, so turning up at four o’clock in the morning is perhaps efficient because you know that people will be there. But it is tough for those who are exposed to this.”  

Here, she noted that border criminologists have long analysed the techniques used by professionals tasked with migration control to cope with their work and offer “some form of self-legitimation in a system that suffers from acute deficits in legitimacy” (Franko, 2019). These include neutralisation, denial and prioritising the deportation of criminal offenders rather than children (Ugelvik, 2016; Bosworth, 2013, 2019; Hansson, 2017). Going further, Professor Franko said that within this “creation of moral discomfort”, the notion of “crimmigrant other” performs a certain kind of moral work in contemporary European societies. Before interrogating what kind of work this is, she examined the concept of Moral Economy to further unpack the production of “moral discomfort”.

Moral engagement and the “burden” of New Public Management (NPM): Towards a moral economy of the border

The concept “Moral Economy” was popularised by E.P Thompson in his seminal 1971 essay and developed by Didier Fassin (2009) and others (Bourgeois and Schoneberg, 2009; Götz, 2015; Edelman, 2015). Professor Franko sees parallels between her and Thompson’s work. Simply put, they both analyse the tense moral engagement that occurs in the wake of socio-economic transformations in society. In Thompson’s case, he explored how the changing nature of work and production during 18^th century industrialisation created a “tension between working people’s historical experience, customary practices, and moral expectations, on the one hand, a cruel exigencies of the new industrial capitalist order, on the other” (Edelman, 2015: 56).  In Professor Franko’s work, contemporary shifts towards a New Public Management model and a managerialist ethos within the Norwegian police force has led to officers framing their objections to and critiques of border work in terms of morality, albeit to differing degrees. Here, I will also share Fassin’s definition of moral economy, as the “appropriation” (Fassin, 2012: 13),“production, dissemination, circulation and use of emotions and values, norms and obligations in the social space: they characterize a particular historical moment and in some cases a specific group” (Fassin, 2009: 1257).

The work of police in migration control is inscribed within a moral economy that allows for the understanding that some acts which many would label as perverse or inhumane have in the eyes of those who commit them a moral justification: some officers assigned altruistic meanings to practices such as night-time immigration raids. Beyond moral justifications, others criticised the use of deportation numbers as official performance targets for police work. One officer articulated his discomfort in terms of history, with a Frontex interviewee referencing World War II, Nazism, and the “dark sides of our European history” that he feared he might be replicating. For other officers, Professor Franko revealed, criticism occurred “not through directly expressed sympathies with migrants but with the feeling that their work […] was reduced in terms of professionalism”. Another officer even reflected on the scales of moral discomfort felt within the police: “Some look at this from an ethical perspective – that is us – while others are more concerned with performance targets and such. And the ethical side thinks that performance targets are a wrong way of doing the work, […] while it seems to me that the others, the other side, have not reflected on this well enough.”

Evidently, Professor Franko finds police officials are involved in complex moral work as they enact a cruel border regime that is in tension with their own moral and professional expectations. But what does this mean? As she argues elsewhere, failure to recognise and differentiate between the diverse “on the ground inter-personal dynamics” of those carrying out border control, means the field of border studies may be “slow in recognising resistance, and potential for it, coming from within the system” and more generally, the “dialectics of change arising from the moral discomfort of doing border work”. Ultimately, considering “the field is very alive with all kinds of moral judgements”, Professor Franko found analysing the ways in which officers framed their actions as “moral economies” a fruitful avenue of enquiry – one that we hope to learn more about in her forthcoming publication.

The productive power of the figure of the “crimmigrant other”: policing boundaries, producing binaries

Let us return to the questions:  what are the moral uses of the “crimmigrant other”? And what kind of work does he or she perform in contemporary European societies? In a similar vein to the suggestion that deviant forms of behaviour are a valuable resource in society (Eriksen, 1996), Professor Franko claims “the idea of the criminal migrants, or crimmigrant other, has benefits for the performance of border work, and processes of social exclusion more generally”.

What are these “benefits”? For Professor Franko, the figure is used for boundary-making. More precisely, in framing border work in terms of morality, Professor Franko found that Norwegian police “wish to define their work as a way of excluding criminal offenders”: the unworthy, non-deserving, guilty, un-ideal “crimmigrant other”. This is captured in the Union representative of the Police Immigration Unit’s statement: “I can say that the PU employees wish to do a good and professional job and work strongly against criminals – or those who have become criminals – with a final decision [to deport]” (2015 Norwegian Parliamentary hearing).

Evidently, the notion of the “crimmigrant other” is productive. It holds the power to “make distinctions and constitute moral boundaries”. On a national level, it sets aside racialised and gendered criminal “others” against whom national “communities of values” are defined (Anderson, 2013). On a level of humanitarian consciousness, it enables the category of the refugee to be carved out under the category of “(other) migrants” in order to channel humanitarian efforts to the former (Costello, 2018, 2019). These moralised figures are mapped onto binaries of worthy/unworthy, innocent/guilty, good/evil, deserving/non-deserving, victim/offender, idea/un-ideal migrant. To further illustrate what the criminalisation and moralisation of migrants can do, Professor Franko presented the notion of the “evil smuggler” on the EU’s external borders: a “suitable enemy”, to whom “moral responsibility is outsourced”. The threat of smuggling networks made up of evil “crimmigrant others” then becomes a justification for stricter border control, even though “reliance on smuggling emerges from the lack of accessible, legal and safe mechanisms for mobility” (Sanchez, 2018: 3). In other words, assigning moral responsibility to the “evil smuggler” refuses to address the wider socio-economic and political structures that produce criminality in the first place. Here, Professor Franko referenced Fassin again who has extensively documented what is gained or lost when we invoke the language of humanitarianism/compassion/empathy at the expense of justice, rights and inclusion, and the specific consequences that prevail for the un-ideal migrant.

Penal power in humanitarian borderlands

The dense yet thought-provoking lecture raised many questions. Is the pathway to the construction of morality already opened by race, class and gender? Do criminologists risk overplaying the salience of the criminal aspect of mobility? If this is the case, the figure of the “crimmigrant other” may indeed eclipse a deeper understanding of what’s happening in the realm of migration and citizenship that might better be explored by foregrounding race, class and (post)coloniality. Do we risk normalising the border work of government officials if we employ the language of morality and humanitarianism to describe their work? Yet, as mentioned, the language of humanitarianism is not itself antithetic to othering, use of force, and control as Fassin reminds us. Finally, where should we be channelling our energy as activists and critical scholars to push back against the increasingly draconian migration policies in Norway and beyond? For example, advocating against the definition of deportation as a performance target. Yet, perhaps this would detract from challenging the system as a whole. In any case, more comparative analysis sensitive to political economy and (post)colonial issues would be beneficial to pave the way towards untangling people from the clasp of crimmigration policies and the mass production of criminality, and, eventually, acknowledge stories like the Baldizzi’s as a legitimate part of the contemporary world’s history and identity.  

Recording of the lecture is available here.

Written by Tiffany Shakespeare @tiffanyshakespr, MSc student at the Centre for Criminology