Introduction: Special issue on ‘Policing,migration and national identity’

For some time, the mobility of the global poor has been framed as a national security problem and policy priority for governments and inter-governmental institutions across the world (D’Appollonia and Reich, 2008; Guild, 2003; Huysmans, 2006). In this context, the police have been routinely tasked with detecting unwanted foreigners and routing them out of the country (Armenta, 2017; Weber, 2013) or, as Giulia Fabini (2017) explained in the case of Italy, with managing ‘illegality’. Increasingly, the policing of the border occurs inland and migration controls are becoming ingrained in ‘homeland policing’ (Gundhus and Aas, 2016; Weber and Bowling, 2004).

In the United States, the Secure Communities programme aims at systematically checking the immigration status of everyone arrested by the local police, whose biometric information is then transmitted to the federal immigration agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the programme’s primary justification is crime prevention and community safety, the local police’s role in it consists of exchanging information on arrestees with ICE to facilitate their removal (Cox and Miles, 2013; Stumpf, 2015). In Britain, aided by an ever expanding web of co-operators, including teachers, university lecturers, doctors and nurses, landlords, employers and the public (Aliverti, 2015; Bowling and Westenra, 2018), the police have taken up migration control duties as part of their daily job. Partnering with immigration staff, police officers in regional forces across the country routinely trace people’s right to be in the country as they are instructed to identify ‘removal opportunities’ of foreigners who are deemed as public nuisances or security threats due to their incivility or criminal behaviour. According to a report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (Vine, 2014: 3), since 2012 when police and immigration partnership was formalized under the remit of ‘Operation Nexus’, the number of identification of foreign nationals in custody suites and police-instigated removals surged. Further afield in countries such as Australia and Italy, where the police have historically retained migration control powers along with crime prevention ones, the police have recently started to use them more systematically. Against the backdrop of an increased politicization and racialization of migration from poorer neighbouring countries, police ID checks are increasingly used to prove migration status and disproportionately fall on ‘suspicious populations’ (Melossi, 2000; Weber, 2011).

Articles in this special issue explore the role of the police in border work. By revisiting debates on the relationship between police and national identity, authors reflect on the police’s role in creating social and global order in the context of fluid and globalized national communities (also Fassin, 2011). Policing scholars have long demonstrated how the police through daily, mundane interactions with civilians communicate whether they belong or not, and create social difference and hierarchies (Bradford, 2014, 2016; Loader, 1997, 2006). When, why and who gets stopped and searched, questioned, handcuffed and arrested is shaped by collective images and ideas about suspiciousness and otherness (Harkin, 2015). Loader and Mulcahy (2003: 304) thus explain that police work,

whether oriented to maintaining order, controlling crime, or any other stated objective of policing [is] always at the same time cultural work [. . .], an authoritative means of allocating risk and blame, of affirming lines of affiliation and exclusion, of constituting the boundaries and identity of cultural and political community.

Policing is, on this view, a vehicle for mediating belonging. Similarly, Vanessa Barker (2016: 212) notes that ‘[t]he police are creative agents in [the production of difference]. They do not simply reflect already given social relations but contribute to the production of those relations.’

Articles in this special issue reflect on how this function of the police, as mediator of national belonging, is put to work in the policing of global mobility and with what implications—institutional, social, global. As borders and crime control blend in contemporary forms of governance, what is the nature of the social and civil order that the police are called to enforce? How are they supposed to enforce that order? And at what costs? Who is the ‘public’ or the ‘community’ in whose name policing is carried out? How do border policing practices shape individual experiences and feelings of belonging? By investigating contemporary border policing practices in different jurisdictions, the contributions shed light on how different societies construct, accommodate and reject difference differently, and how national communities imagine themselves. ‘How a society is policed’—Peter Waddington (1999: 26, emphases in original) reminded us—‘depends upon who is policed.’ Articles also offer insights on how the police may enable and foster a more plural, non-racialized and inclusionary articulation of national identity, while embracing a notion of security and order which encompasses the collective and is not limited to those replete with social and economic capital.

Aliverti and Parmar explore the rise of immigration enforcement in UK policing by examining the everyday work of ‘Operation Nexus’, a joint initiative designed to identify foreign nationals brought into custody and assess removal opportunities at an early stage in the criminal justice process. My article places this initiative within the broader social context where contemporary policing takes place, characterized by a growing blurriness between licit and illicit, order and disorder, and uncertainty about people’s identities. In this context, I argue, the ‘power of legitimate naming’ (Loader, 1997: 3) once bestowed by the police, as a guide for individuals to render the social world intelligible, has been eroded. Immigration enforcement has been brought in to decipher the new geographies of crime and disorder, disentangle identities and extirpate risky outsiders. Yet, at the same time, it lays bare the challenges of asserting authority in a globalized world.

In her piece, Parmar discusses how Nexus has revitalized racial categories and technologies which have a long vintage in British policing, dating back to colonial times. Through a detailed examination of police custody processes, she evidences how the growing involvement of the police in immigration has transformed citizenship into a disciplinary device to classify police suspects while unifying the treatment of racialized groups whose right to belong is questioned. These practices, she argues, have implications beyond policing as the people subject to enhanced checks are misrecognized and rendered perpetually outsiders.

In a different setting, Weber scrutinizes how the everyday operation of ‘internal bordering’ impacts on experiences of belonging. She draws on the accounts of young people from migrant background on police encounters in Australia to empirically document the role of police as ‘arbiters and shapers of belonging’. The rich data presented convey the subtleties in how feelings and experiences of (un)belonging are moulded through mundane interactions with ticket officers, security guards, shopkeepers and the public, and powerfully shows the role of the police in reinforcing or unsettling ‘affective belonging’.

Next, Campesi and Fabini examine how police officers in Italy instrumentalize immigration enforcement for public security and social defence. In their account of immigration detention decisions, they highlight the discursive construction of ‘migrant social dangerousness’ as the main ground for police coercion. This concept, which is often supported by vague references to migrants’ unreliability and marginality, is repeated over and over in police’s decisions and goes often unchallenged. The lax procedural regime that characterizes immigration decision making, they argue, offers an attractive policing tool to govern marginal populations, not so much through deportation but through banishment from urban spaces. Social dangerousness, in its modern guise, revitalizes longstanding notions in positivist criminology while reconfiguring the relationship between crime, race and national identity.

Social dangerousness also entails a preventive logic to crime control, which is further explored by Gundhus and Jansen in their article on the use of intelligence in everyday policing in Norway. On the face of it, the appeal to actuarial instruments and sophisticated tools to assess and manage ‘migrant-related’ risk and threats diverges from the outmoded language of public defence alluded to by the Italian police. On further examination, however, their lexicons and rationales share striking parallels and illustrate how the construction of danger and risk are contingent upon cultural norms and social hierarchies. Focusing on the growing role of police intelligence analysts, Gundhus and Jansen observe that paradoxically in an effort to reduce uncertainty intelligence-led policing generates more complexity and amplifies anxieties about the unknown by constructing insecure identities as dangerous. In this role, the police are not just preserving social order but actively reconfiguring notions of social order through anticipatory logic.

Finally, Van der Woude’s article zooms out from the national sphere to examine the politics of border controls in its iterations between the local, the national and the supranational. By exploring ‘jurisdictional games’ by national border control bureaucracies, she argues that areas of incomplete EU regulation are exploited or actively created by nation states to retain sovereignty control. An example in point is the permanent border control functions exercised at intra-Schengen border posts which, despite the principle of freedom of movement, are operative in various states. In operating within the space of discretion left by the multilayer governance within Europe, nation states strategically negotiate and calibrate the impact of globalization to preserve national sovereignty and national identity.

Despite the increased involvement of the police in migration control, this aspect of the police’s work remains unexamined. Taken together, this special issue represents the most comprehensive investigation into migration policing undertaken to date. It brings together scholars working on migration policing from criminology, law and sociology, to reflect on how the policing of global mobility is shaping domestic policing and to identify continuities and discontinuities in migration policing across different jurisdictions through detailed, empirically grounded case studies. Contributors benefited from focused discussions and feedback on draft versions of their articles by a specialized and select audience of researchers and practitioners during a British Academy-funded international workshop at the University of Warwick in May 2017. Collectively, the articles transcend disciplines and geographical boundaries, and explore the theoretical and social implications of migration and its control for criminal justice.