Abstract
Anyone following the US presidential primaries may have noticed an increasingly vociferous debate about immigration and crime. The front runner to be the Republican presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) is considering a policy of aggressive immigration enforcement to encourage millions of undocumented foreign nationals in the US to leave (or ‘self deport’), apparently to restore the rule of law. The lack of evidence behind such rhetoric is exposed very effectively by this international collection of essays, most of which are based on empirical studies. The book shows that immigration does not in fact seem to have increased crime in the US, and that there are similar findings from Australian and Canadian studies. In fact, there is some evidence that the presence of immigrant communities in the US actually reduces expected crime rates. The European research is more equivocal, showing that under some conditions there is an overrepresentation of immigrants in some types of offending, though in most cases the research is too limited to reach strong conclusions.
The book is divided into four sections and 17 fairly concise chapters. It is sometimes unclear where different authors consider immigrant status to end and citizenship to begin, reflecting to some extent the varying national approaches to this issue. One or two chapters are written by people not fluent in English and these chapters are poorly edited, making them hard to follow. But this is a book that is well worth reading. From careful discussions of empirical evidence, it moves into a final section that takes a more internationalist perspective on immigration control, and adds theoretical depth to the book.
The first section looks at the criminality of immigrants. It includes a careful discussion of US studies from this, and the previous century, suggesting that, contrary to popular myth, immigration discourages crime by revitalizing local economies and strengthening social structures. Other chapters describe Italian and Swiss studies showing a greater prevalence of immigrants in some types of crime, though the methodology is not sophisticated enough to establish if the crime rate is higher than for those of the same age and gender in the established population.
The second section focuses on immigrants’ experiences of particular forms of criminal victimization, such as trafficking, domestic violence and hate crime. Although knowledge is severely limited by unsophisticated data collection mechanisms, this section exposes the multiple layers of victimization experienced by immigrants. Many are afraid to challenge abusive treatment for fear of deportation, and people trafficking emerges as a major problem that has resulted in around 2.5 million people being in forced labour across the world. In a particularly interesting discussion of hate crime in the US, McDonald suggests that the legislation may be causing more problems than it solves. He argues that it raises immigrant group expectations of protection and redress, only for hopes to be dashed by the difficulties of enforcement, leading ultimately to feelings of betrayal and lack of concern. He also points out that hate crime does not appear to be related to rises in immigration, and considers that this may be because many immigrant communities live together in enclaves. His conclusion is that policies designed to promote integration may therefore lead to greater victimization of immigrants.
The third section looks at police responses to immigrant crime and victimization. Skogan describes the barriers to effective policing of the estimated 37 million foreign born residents in the United States. Many may have had early experiences of police corruption and brutality in their home countries, which continue to affect relationships with the police. This is compounded by language problems, pre-existing sensitivities amongst minority ethnic communities about racial profiling and racism, and the reluctance of undocumented migrants to engage with the police for fear of deportation. Concerns about under-reporting of crime, and more unsolved offences as a consequence of immigrant communities not talking to the police, has led to the fascinating concept of ‘sanctuary cities’, which include major metropolises like Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco. In these cities, the police are in most cases not allowed to ask about immigration status, and do not automatically contact immigration authorities when they stop someone with suspect documentation. Vogel et al.’s comparative examination of police enforcement of immigration law in Germany, the UK and the US shows that an opposite calculation has been made in Germany. The German authorities endorse the explicit use of racial profiling to target suspected illegal immigrants, something that no doubt happens in the US and UK but is not legitimate policy.
The final section on the enforcement of international borders is more discursive and on many levels the most challenging. It questions the wisdom of attempts by rich western states to protect their borders through detention and deportation policies, and to this end Griffin argues that we need to break out of the short-sighted view that removing large numbers of people, often to the Caribbean and Latin America, is enough to protect borders: ‘… the more they deport, the more they destabilize the receiving countries and thereby promote conditions for return illegal immigration that is often connected with gangs and transnational crime’ (p. 284). In a troubling subsequent chapter, Kil, Menjivar and Doty draw on ‘brutalization theory’, to explore how the militarized US/Mexico border shapes an environment that allows violence to become a legitimate response to undocumented migration. They argue that patriotism, vigilantism and racism combine with security concerns to legitimate frequent border violence, while the increased difficulty of crossing the border means that people smuggling organized by criminal gangs has become more lucrative.
In the most polemical chapter in the book, Palidda argues that immigrants in western countries have been systematically criminalized and victimized as a consequence of the disorder and social breakdown that accompanies development in neo-liberal states. In such circumstances, he argues, attempts to create security, including border security, usually excel at recreating insecurity, and have led to the notion of ‘enemy immigrants’ and the mass imprisonment of foreign nationals across Europe. His pessimistic thesis implies essentially that immigrants are exploited and disposable assets for developing neo-liberal societies in need of both labour and scapegoats to delay inevitable collapse. As with many polemics, there are many unanswered questions and little evidence, but this chapter helps to push at conventional thinking, and balances the careful and somewhat dry tone of the rest of the book.
There is much to grapple with in this collection and it offers a usefully broad introduction to debates about immigration and crime. The reasons why the paltry evidence of immigrant criminality does not seem to penetrate public perceptions or political debates would need a volume to itself, but the editor offers one neat explanation: ‘For the public, any crime by an immigrant is evidence of the criminality of immigrants’ (p. xviii). In other words, it does not matter that the rate of crime is lower amongst immigrants because if they had not been in the country they would have had no opportunity to offend. It will never be easy to dispute the logic of arguments pitched in this way, and this book leaves little room for doubt that attacking immigration and immigrants is still a legitimate way to express feelings about difference that are otherwise illegitimate in tolerant liberal societies. But it also nicely illustrates how empirical research can bring some balance to impassioned debates about immigration raging in many developed countries – an important contribution given that Romney is certainly not the only politician tapping into the depressingly familiar scapegoating of immigrants that emerges at times of economic instability.