Reading the Crimmigrant Other

Guest post by Lucia Zedner. Lucia is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Law, and member of the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. This is the second post of Border Criminologies Book Discussion Week on The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power. 

Two competing depictions of the would-be immigrant populate the opening pages of Franko’s hugely insightful and engaging book. The first is an object of humanitarian concern, compassion, and bearer of rights. The second is portrayed as a threat to social order, an intruder associated with crime and illegality. Franko’s latest book tells the story of how the ‘crimmigrant other’ came to prevail and why. She depicts the crimmigrant other as the creation of increasingly hostile border controls, of exclusionary politics and practices designed to protect the welfare of citizens from the mass mobility of migrants, caused both by the economic pull of globalisation and the push of war, conflict and global warming.

Franko reveals the ‘illegality’ of migrants to be a political choice, underpinned by laws and increasingly enforced by high-tech technologies of surveillance, identification and control.  Especially fascinating is her observation that while for academics ‘the ambiguous and contested nature of immigrant illegality may seem self-evident … for many migrants it is precisely the apparent firmness of such categories and their strong association with criminality that are among the most difficult aspects of detention or involvement in court proceedings.’ The crimmigrant other may be a construct produced by ‘the intricate connections between the law, scientific knowledge, bureaucratic practices, politics, media, and popular discourse’, but it has morphed rapidly into something altogether more concrete and exclusionary.The Crimmigrant Other offers a brilliant, theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded analysis of the discriminatory treatment of non-citizens in a rapidly globalising world.

Franko provides a sustained and penetrating critique of social construction of the crimmigrant other and its ruinous consequences for those so labelled. Yet a familiar risk in criminology is that concepts and labels escape the academy to take on a life of their own in political and popular discourse. The risk thus arises that writing about the crimmigrant other unwittingly becomes part of the process of construction, falsely cementing in public perception the association between immigration and crime. Adopting language so close to the political rhetoric of xenophobes and isolationists who brand migrants as alien, unwanted or criminal may be hazardous. Terms like ‘crimmigration’ raise similar concerns given that such constructs have a life of their own and are liable to misuse. Take Feindstrafrecht (enemy criminal law) first developed to recognise how laws discriminate between citizens and those deemed adversaries, but later adopted by German right-wing extremists to promote bigoted, exclusionary policies.

The criminal law targets wrongful conduct resulting in or risking harm, conduct that is defined in law and must be proven in court. Franko opens with the powerful quote by Ellie Wiesel that ‘You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is illegal’. Although Franko stresses that ‘migrants can never be illegal themselves’ and acknowledges the crimmigrant other is ‘a dangerous word’, the declared aim of the book is to show ‘how the figure of the migrant in itself is intimately connected to illegality.’ To give this association such prominence risks inadvertently validating the very concept she criticises.

The term crimmigrant other also overlooks the fact that only a minority of migrants are so identified. Franko rightly acknowledges that ‘global mobility’ is divided ‘into distinct categories of migrants and various categories of bona fide travellers, such as tourists, students and business traveller’. Indeed, migration statistics for 2019 show that of c.642,000 people migrating to the UK, 36% came for study and 35% for work - of whom 55% came on the highest Tier 1 & Tier 2 visas, with less than 20% on Tier 5 temporary work visas. The UK is far less open to migration than many in Scandinavia like Sweden, but has a similar acceptance rate of asylum seekers to Norway. By no means all migrants are deemed ‘crimmigrant’, ruthless social and legal sorting permits most to pass seamlessly across borders. Many migrants are permitted to stay precisely because they bring vital assets to the domestic economy whether as fee-paying students, skilled or unskilled workers. By contrast, those designated as crimmigrant are that unfortunate minority for whom the border is not simply a crossing but an insuperable hurdle. The ‘complex set of divisions’ Franko observes at work may be less ‘between insiders and outsiders’ or ‘judgments about right and wrong, good and evil’ than between those welcomed on economic grounds and those excluded as fiscal risks. Franko rightly notes the ‘pervasive and insidious connection between migration, crime and other issues, including national security’, but has less to say about the economic imperatives at play. While the desperate are dissuaded by the carefully calculated deterrents of crimmigration, economic migrants are welcomed as essential to national prosperity. The closing of borders during the COVID-19 crisis has only brought home the immense economic and social costs of limiting mobility.

To recognise that crimmigration is targeted at a minority of migrants is not to downplay the terrible burdens of exclusion and coercive force to which the crimmigrant other is subject. However, it might suggest that the most decisive aspect of bordering is less the line drawn between citizens and non-citizens or the ‘maintenance of moral order’, than the brutal economic selection that ushers in trusted travellers but debars or deports those regarded as potential burdens on the state.

Franko rightly recognises that ‘immigrant criminality is painstakingly and systematically crafted through a myriad of rules and regulations’ and she insightfully shows how the free movement of peoples within the EU is achieved only by hardening external and extraterritorial border controls. In so doing, The Crimmigrant Other raises intriguing questions about whether asserting sovereignty at the border is an inescapable element of what it means to be a modern state. If a wholly borderless world is inconceivable without a radical re-thinking of existing modes of governance, we are left wondering what it would take for states radically to shift from regarding aspiring migrants as crimmigrant others to recognising them as fellow humans deserving of compassion and a hospitable welcome, irrespective of their economic value.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Zedner, L. (2020). Reading the Crimmigrant Other. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/09/reading [date]